# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1864_S298
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

298    Two Documents from the Prussian Lutheran Church.

on p. 78 the "belonging of the outward ecclesiastical organism to the true Church" is asserted;

on p. 91 it is rejected that "unbelievers and the outward ecclesiastical organism fall outside the true Church";

on p. 87 it is rejected that "the congregation of believers, the spiritual Church, is the true Church";

on p. 68 it is said that "the true Church is at the same time essentially externa societas [an external society]";

on p. 75 it is taught that the concept of "congregatio sanctorum [assembly of the saints] requires not merely an invisible number of believers, but a visible holding-together of the same through Word and Sacrament."

On the basis of these propositions Huschke reckons the externa societas and the whole outward organism into the essence of the Church in such a way that no distinction obtains between the true and the improper Church; even though he grants on p. 74 that "the invisible side of the Church is the more important in dignity," yet for him the believers are not alone and exclusively the true Church, but only the invisible side of the Church, while the true Church itself is at the same time essentially, and in such a manner, the externa societas that everything embraced by the externa societas and its organism belongs also to the true Church. Hence too, as follows below, Huschke makes absolutely no distinction between the body of Christ and the institutional Church, but rather sets the latter directly identical with the body of Christ.

The Symbols, by contrast, distinguish the congregation of believers from the externa societas. They say: only the former are properly, that is, really, the Church or the body of Christ; but of the ungodly members which the externa societas includes within itself, it is said directly: they are not members of the body of Christ, not the true, proper Church. The Symbols thereby teach:

1) That not everything embraced by the periphery of the externa societas, the outward Church, at the same time also belongs to the true Church; rather, the Symbols draw two circles: an externa societas, which embraces the good and the evil, and within it the narrower circle of those truly believing, who alone are the body of Christ, the true Church;

2) That what makes us members of this true Church is therefore not the externa societas and membership in it, but faith alone, the interna societas fidei et spiritus s. in cordibus [the inward fellowship of faith and of the Holy Spirit in the hearts]; and

3) that if by the "essence" of the Church one must understand that which the Church properly is, or that which makes us members of the Church in the proper sense, it follows that the externa societas, the outward ecclesiastical organism, does not belong to the essence of the Church, but only to its earthly form of appearance — or, as the Symbols literally say, that the ungodly do indeed participate in the outward organism, but are nevertheless "not the true Church."