# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1864_S301
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Two Documents from the Prussian Lutheran Church.    301

hypocrites are members of Christ (outwardly), and yet also, as members of the devil, are not (inwardly), is simply resolved."

With these propositions Huschke simply designates Christ as the Head of the institutional Church. But since it can only be said of persons that they stand in a relation as members to Christ and His body, Huschke thereby says

1. that even hypocrites and the wicked are real, actual members of the body of Christ, albeit dead ones, and from this it follows

2. that it is not faith that makes us members of the body of Christ, but the outward organism of the Church, while faith only conditions and produces the differing character of the members of Christ.

3. Accordingly Huschke cannot mean by the body of Christ, at all, an inward spiritual fellowship with Christ, but only the outward organization of the ecclesiastical organism.

Against this the Symbols say:

1. Never and nowhere that hypocrites and the wicked are members of the body of Christ; rather, they say quite definitely and decisively in the Apology, Art. 4, that they "are not members of Christ, but only dead members of the Church"; from this it plainly follows that in this passage the Symbols do not mean the true Church, which is identical with the body of Christ, but the Church late dicta [broadly termed], that is, the externa societas; and the Symbols set up the express contrast: the ungodly are indeed "members of the Church, that is, according to outward society, but not members of Christ," and adduce as the reason: "for they are members of the devil." To be a member of Christ and at the same time also a member of the devil is, therefore, for the Symbols a contradiction.

2. But if the body of Christ, according to our Symbols, is nothing but the congregation of believers, then it is self-evident that it is thereby said that faith alone is that on which membership in the body of Christ rests, and consequently

3. that the body of Christ can be nothing other than the spiritual fellowship with Christ, such as exists in faith and through faith.

V.

Huschke says, p. 75: "Only thus, as visible, is the Church also an article of faith, since we can only believe what and how God has revealed it."

In this proposition everything is turned, as it were in sum, upside down that the whole Lutheran Church, in all the Symbols and writings of the fathers of the faith, has hitherto taught unanimously — namely, that the sole object of all faith is not a thing insofar and because it is visibly presented to human eyes by God, but solely insofar as it is stated in the Word of God; and that consequently the Church too is only an object of faith, because it is according to its essence invisible, while its existence is guaranteed and promised to us through God's Word everywhere that the Gospel is preached purely and the Sacraments rightly administered. —