# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1864_S293
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Two Documents from the Prussian Lutheran Church.    293

made absolutely impossible by the fact that, just as in the Word of God itself, so also in our Symbols not a single passage is found where the same is taught anywhere with the clarity and unambiguousness necessary for such a matter; on the contrary, the Symbols declare the whole realm of outward ceremonies — resting solely on ecclesiastical arrangement, and hence also of church ordinances — to be an adiaphoron, a piece of that inalienable evangelical freedom dearly purchased with the blood of Christ (Augsburg Confession 7 and 28, Formula of Concord 10). And this must count for us as a principle of Lutheran church doctrine just as absolutely and finally decided in our Symbols as it is in general symbolically and finally decided for us that the Christian Church, according to its essence, is nothing other than the kingdom of grace, freed and redeemed by Christ's blood from all bondage of the Law, in which, as in Christ, nothing avails but faith, which is active through love.

From this view of the points in controversy set forth here, it is sufficiently clear that the doctrine of church government [K.-Regiment], in the manner and in the particulars in which it has now become disputed among us, is for us not a so-called open question, but is in part one deeply and immediately connected with the doctrine of faith and justification, and in part one absolutely, and with unquestionable clarity and decisiveness, symbolically completed and closed in its own proper principles.

Such is our position on the matter, and from this standpoint we see confronting us the Breslau Synod and the Lutheran Church of Prussia, whose association we have joined, torn and split into various differing theological and ecclesiastical tendencies and parties. There thus arises for us the question: what is our position toward these tendencies and parties, and how, from our standpoint, is an ecclesiastical connection with the Breslau Synod possible and conceivable in the future?

Since we, the Lutherans of Nassau, reserved for ourselves, upon our joining the Breslau Synod, freedom from the Breslau synodical resolutions, these are in themselves not something that would burden us, nor is their alteration something we would need to wish for personally. Nor does the subordination to an ecclesiastical superintendence and supreme direction on the part of a church government burden us at all, such as we ourselves have sought and requested for ourselves upon our joining the Prussian Lutheran Church. We have rather expressly shown above that from our theological standpoint we acknowledge a church power that for us rests in the congregation of believers, or in the spiritual priesthood of all Christians, and out of which there also arises for us the existence and the concept of an ecclesiastical power of order and supreme direction, whose representative organ is the church government — whether now in an individual congregation or in a larger ecclesiastical body, according as the latter forms itself out of historical circumstances or considerations of ecclesiastical usefulness. We protest against