# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1859_S34
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

34 Preface to the 1859 Volume.

-rible error of the Roman Church, when it asserts that the Church cannot err. Gerhard calls this papal axiom "a certain general bolt-hole into which the papists flee in all controversies, and, as it were, the box of Pandora, with which the papacy covers all its falsifications and errors and all its superstition." (Loc. de eccl. § 104.) But to say that the Church in general, or a particular church, has not erred with respect to the full saving truth, and to say that it cannot err, are worlds apart from one another. To wish to maintain the latter is as much against Scripture as against experience;*) but to wish to deny the former means making Christ's promise a lie: "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:31-32. Rightly, therefore, does Gerhard write on John 16:13 in his Evangelical Harmony: "So long as the Church hears the voice of her bridegroom, shepherd, and head, Christ, and so far as she follows the guidance of the Word, lets herself be led by the Word through the Holy Spirit, and submits to His teaching authority: so far she is guided into all truth, and so far she does not err." Were it not so, then all certainty of faith would likewise be lost.

But however certain it is, on this basis, that there can be a visible church which possesses the full truth (naturally only according to a perfection of the parts, not according to a perfection of degree), it is by no means thereby asserted that such a visible church always actually exists. It is, alas, only too evident that the Church has often experienced long centuries of eclipse with respect to public doctrine. We cannot refrain from letting Gerhard speak again here, to clarify this important point.**) He writes, namely, as follows in his Loci on this matter: "The name of the Church is taken either for the catholic Church, or for a particular church. The catholic Church is so called either with respect to all the elect, or to all who are called. The catholic Church of the elect comprises not only the truly believing and holy who are still fighting on earth, but also the

*) Gerhard proves with seven grounds that the Church can err: 1. namely, because the Church of the Old Testament has often erred; 2. because there are divine predictions of a certain great seduction to come; 3. because the particular churches are warned not to err and not to lend their ear to seducers; 4. because experience teaches that the Church of the New Testament has erred; 5. because the knowledge of those who make up the Church is not yet perfect; 6. because the Church can sin; 7. because all pastors can err. L. c. § 111-115. With this, then, the convenient compendious proof of the Romanists — that they cannot possibly err, as surely as they were once the Church, and that therefore everything their church teaches may, indeed must, be accepted unexamined — is destroyed.

**) The point is so important because, if there is not always a wholly orthodox visible church, then this also cannot be called the Church in the proper sense of the word, outside of which there is no salvation; rather, that [true Church] would have to be the invisible one.