# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1864_S292
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

292    Two Documents from the Prussian Lutheran Church.

into which all church power is in principle placed by God, so that when Huschke, using the wording of the Symbols, confesses that church power resides in the Church, this has for him only the sense and meaning: "in the outward organism instituted in the Church by God";

c) in this way, however, church power and the offices entrusted with it by virtue of divine institution essentially become a divine authority and full power standing over believing individuals, in relation to which the individual church members — indeed, whole local congregations — find themselves only in a relation of legal subordination and of an obedience owed to divine authority.

This whole view, as it has been set forth at length by Mr. Director Huschke in his most recent writing, and as it has to this day also been defended in substance by other members of the Supreme Church Council without being refuted in any point, we see clearly and decisively rejected in the following propositions of our Symbols, which we must hold fast as fundamental principles and inalienable sanctuaries of Lutheran doctrine.

1) According to our Symbols, the faith of Christians (and with it their salvation) is bound absolutely to nothing but Word and Sacrament, from which it follows, on the one hand, that nothing more whatever is needed for the essential and proper existence of the Church than the administration of the means of grace, and likewise, on the other hand, that in the churchly realm there can absolutely be no other divine authority than the preaching of the divine Word and, correspondingly, the Christian preaching office insofar as it is commissioned by God with the preaching of the Word of God. This is stated with final clarity in our Symbols when the Augsburg Confession, Art. 7, names Gospel and Sacrament as the absolutely sole marks of the Church (notae ecclesiae), as against the whole realm of outward church order, and likewise when Art. 28 places the very essence of the Christian office of preaching and bishop solely in the administration of the means of grace.

2) It is an irrefutable fundamental proposition of the Symbols (Appendix to the Smalcald Articles) that the Church alone has the keys, and as a consequence thereof all other church power as well, such as, for example, the power to call and install preachers, etc. But the Symbols say expressly that by this they understand the Church that has "the priesthood," or the Church of which Christ's saying holds true, "where two or three are gathered in my name" — that is, therefore, not an outward organism of offices, but the congregation of believers, in whose assembly Christ is present.

3) As the sole source from which our Symbols derive the duty of observing churchly ordinances and of obedience toward every outward church government, they invariably and everywhere adduce only the principle "of love and order"; but this is not only in itself already the direct contradiction of every concept of an outward church government demanding obedience by virtue of divine institution and authority, but the existence of such a church regiment is also, for the Lutheran Church,