# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1864_S300
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

300    Two Documents from the Prussian Lutheran Church.

4. These believing individuals therefore always stand in a dependent relation to the institution, as to a divine authority.

If, against this, the Symbols say that the Church, properly and according to its essence, is nothing other than the congregation of believers, and that it is therefore faith alone that conditions membership in the true Church, or the body of Christ, then it follows immediately and without doubt from this:

1. That faith alone is that which properly and really constitutes the Church; (that it is therefore an utterly anti-symbolical, un-Lutheran notion to think of the call as church-forming even without the believing acceptance of the Word — that is, of Word and Sacrament as opus operatum);

2. Faith, consequently, cannot have the (institutional) Church as its presupposition, but only the Word of God in itself, apart from its institutional form and administration, which is only the subsequent and inessential thing. Thus it is the Word alone, not the institutional Church, that is the sole foundation of the congregation, that is, of faith — a proposition which we must strictly maintain and defend as a chief pillar of Lutheranism over against the papacy.

3. Faith, and with it the congregation of believers, is the seat and source from which the institutional Church, with all its powers, offices, and ordinances, is to be derived.

4. Faith and the Church are dependent absolutely on no other divine authority than that of the Word of God, just as the Word alone is the sole ground on which faith rests.

5. It is not in an institutional organism that Christ is present to the Church, working and ruling within it, but solely in His Word and through His Word, which faith lays hold of.

IV.

Huschke says, p. 92: "Holy Scripture makes Christ the Head of the Church as of His body on earth, expressly also in its organism and the working of its members, without thereby distinguishing between believers and hypocrites — yet surely precisely as clear proof that the admixture of hypocrites has no influence on this. The Apology likewise makes Christ the Head of the believing ecclesia, in which Gospel and Sacrament are administered, and thus not immediately in virtue of its being believing, but first of all in virtue of its being, or acting as, an institution — which occurs through Word and Sacrament and the offices and ordinances serving these, for it is through this that faith is first brought forth." Cf. p. 199.

P. 93: "The Apology has nothing against the teaching of its opponents (the Romanists) that hypocrites and the wicked are dead members on the body of Christ — a manner of speaking which also finds its ground in John 15:2 and other passages of Scripture, and with which the apparent contradiction, that the