# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1864_S306
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

306    Two Documents from the Prussian Lutheran Church.

In the Name of Jesus.

We, the undersigned Lutheran pastors, who have withdrawn from our former connection with the Supreme Church Council at Breslau and united into a separate synod, hereby publicly bear witness before God and everyone as follows:

The common foundation of our synodical body is the Word of God of the Old and New Testaments, as it is set forth purely and clearly in the Symbols of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, namely

1. the three ancient Symbols; 2. the unaltered Augsburg Confession and its Apology; 3. Luther's two Catechisms; 4. the Smalcald Articles; 5. the Formula of Concord.

To conduct our preaching office according to the norm of this confession of the Lutheran Church is what we have been duly called to by our congregations, and this we have vowed and promised under oath. We hereby publicly confirm and repeat this our vow and promise:

As a free Lutheran synod, we do not wish to be free from the rule and norm of the divine Word for faith and life, nor yet from human, civil, and ecclesiastical order; rather, we wish to see safeguarded the evangelical freedom which we and our congregations have in Christ, over against papistical false doctrine and tyranny.

So we also hereby bear public witness that we and our congregations are not separated from the Supreme Church Council because we were unwilling to tolerate any church order or any oversight of our conduct of office; rather, the ground and cause of this separation is solely the false doctrine persistently defended by the Supreme Church Council and applied in its proceedings — against which we were compelled, by the confession of our Church, not only to bear witness in words, but at last also to protect our congregations by the act of separation.

On the ground of this our confession we reject as false doctrine, contending against the same, the teachings concerning Church, church office, and church order set up by our opponents, namely:

1. that any one of the existing ecclesiastical communions is the Church or the body of Christ;

2. that an office established in the Church for the maintenance and administration of church order, now commonly called church government, is a part of the office of the Word instituted by Christ; or that such an office is expressly commanded by God in Holy Scripture and is therefore of divine right, or that it is spiritual authority;

3. that church ordinances are laws binding the conscience equally with the commandments of God or the orders of civil authority.

Since, then, over against these errors, we find ourselves brought together by God into an ecclesiastical union, we recognize ourselves as ob-