# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1859_S61
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Does the Doctrine of a General Invisible Church Require Union? 61

separated on earth and often at odds with one another; and though all
territory here below is measured out and divided, yet there is one place
where they all meet who, through the blood of Jesus, have access to God:
it is the throne of worship. And I repeat: this fellowship of believers —
this peace amid the strife of the present, and this pledge of a more
blessed future — is, next to the blessedness of one's own sonship to God,
the greatest joy of the Christian.

But Christianity takes shape not only in individual persons, but also
in ecclesiastical communities. Communal character belongs to it. So the
Lord wills it, so the nature of the case requires it. Ecclesiastical
communities are distinguished not merely in externals, but also according
to truth and error. The saving truth has been given us to possess, not
merely in the form of an undeveloped indefiniteness, but in an
ever-richer, unfolding fullness of its whole content. Just as we are to
possess faith and love not merely as an undeveloped disposition of the
heart, but in all-sided activity and demonstration as the good of our
conduct, so they are also to become the ever more complete good of our
knowledge — not a merely intellectual knowledge, but the kind of which
our High Priest says that it is eternal life (John 17:3). It is
conditioned by obedience to the Word. According to this the churches are
distinguished. If we are certain that God has given our church, before
the others, to know the blessed truth of the grace of God in Christ, then
we also know that its calling is to guard and increase this treasure. But
then the other thing is also certain to us: that love for the truth must
prove itself in faithfulness to the church's possession of the truth. It
binds us. That is not bondage to formulas. To the truth, of which our
church has been appointed by God to be the guardian, we are subject. "In
freedom subject" — that is our motto; for "the truth shall make you
free," and love is a mode of freedom's conduct. And just as little is
that contempt, hatred, and enmity against the others. For what gives us
any relation to them at all is the truth of the grace of God in Christ.
If our faithfulness to the possession of the truth of our church, whose
stewards we are, is an exercise of love toward the truth — a truth that
also makes those others blessed — then it will surely not teach us to
hate them either, but to love them; not to estrange them, but to bind
them to us. What separates us is error. Now, if it were only a matter of
differences of human opinion and the like, of merely subjective worth, it
would be reprehensible self-conceit to attach such weight to them. But if
it is a matter of the saving truth of God in its self-unfolding, then
faithfulness requires that we prove our love for it in protest against
error. We are not speaking of individual persons, but of the confession
of the churches. It is not the case that truth is here and error, instead
of truth, is there. Certainly, there too is truth, the truth of Christ,
but error mixed in with the truth. It is against this that we contend.
And...