# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1864_S299
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Two Documents from the Prussian Lutheran Church.    299

(One must, then, distinguish the visible from the invisible Church, the Church proprie [properly] and late dicta [broadly termed], from one another, only not separate them, as the Reformed spirit does; Huschke, however, already holds the mere distinguishing to be Reformed spiritualism. The invisible Church is therefore no idea Platon. [Platonic idea], hovering ungraspable in the air, but rather lives and moves within the visible Church, is always to be found and grasped in and alongside it — whence the saying, huc refer oculos [turn your eyes hither] — and yet the two remain, in this, always distinguished, as kernel and shell.)

III.

Huschke says, p. 84: "In determining the concept of the Church, one is not to proceed from the congregation of believers as the highest and foremost thing."

P. 74: "In the concept of the Church, one is not to proceed from the invisible side, the kingdom of faith, but from the sensibly perceptible act of the call. The call precedes faith, as the body precedes the spirit."

P. 80: "The Church as an acting institution is prior to the fellowship of faith."

P. 86 it says: "Not the Word of God in itself, but the Church as an institution, is the foundation of the congregation, ... the regular immediate authority, especially over the outward affairs of the Church."

Ibid. it is said that "the outward Church is not a product of the faith of individuals."

P. 88 Stahl's view is defended: "that the institutional Church is Christ within it (the Church); the Church as a divine institution has power over the fellowship of faith; the latter is not sovereign, that is, over against the institution" (cf. pp. 82 and 198: "the institutional Church is Christ").

P. 91: "Not the invisible faith and the believers are the first thing, but the call is the first thing and makes those called into the Church," etc.

According to these propositions of Huschke's, then:

1. The call is that which in the first place and fundamentally grounds the Church; through it the Church becomes, or constitutes itself as, an institution (in institutional ordinances and offices established by the Lord);

2. In this institutional organism, as in a divine foundation, Christ is present, and therefore a divine power and authority indwells the institution as such;

3. Out of this ecclesiastical institution the believing individuals are only then generated; they are therefore, in relation to the institution, only the second, the subsequent thing, while the primary and properly fundamental element in the concept of the Church is the outward ecclesiastical organism, in which the Church is present even where there are no believers, that is, in the moment before these are born out of the institutional Church;