# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1859_S144
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

144 From this year's Preface to the Saxon Church and School Paper.

it exists for that same Word, and does not stand beside it; for otherwise it at once becomes an unevangelical law, which must be contested. Nor is the truth or efficacy of the Word dependent on the order. For otherwise it becomes, in the Roman manner, necessary to salvation, and encroaches on the prerogative of the Holy Spirit, who blows where he wills. Sentences such as "only the Word administered in an orderly manner brings the Spirit" (Ev. K.-Z. 1857 No. 33) cease to be unobjectionable. For then the first question would not be: where is the word of truth? but rather: where is orderly administration — that is, orderly administration of the Word? But that is the logic of Rome. And when in Kliefoth's ecclesiastical journal (1857, 1, "The Doctrine of Justification and the Doctrine of the Church," p. 21) one reads the sentence: "Precisely because the Lutheran knows no finished Christian life prior to justification, precisely because before it he knows no other faith than the seeking faith, and no other grace than one that is far from him — precisely for that reason he can receive grace in no other way than through actual means of grace, and can in turn receive the means of grace in no other way than in a divinely warranted manner, and thus in no other way than by means of an office instituted by God" — then it would follow that whoever seeks the forgiveness of his sins with the divine grace must first of all ask where the office instituted by God is, so that through it he may receive the means of grace in a divinely warranted manner. So then perhaps that very recte in Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession — est autem ecclesia congregatio sanctorum, in qua evangelium recte docetur et recte administrantur sacramenta — would mean as much as "by means of an office instituted by God"? "Do I recognize," the Erlanger Zeitschrift rightly asks (1857, April), "the means of grace — whether they are the divinely warranted ones — by the office through which I receive them? Or do I recognize the office — whether it is the one instituted by God — by the scriptural conformity of its administration of the means of grace? Is it obedience toward the office instituted by God that God demands, or faith in the Word of God?" We have, however, already voiced our misgivings about this turn of churchly thought on an earlier occasion (cf. 1857 No. 36). We know well how the emphasis on the office and on the statutory order has come about. The most recent course of contemporary events, and the present state of the times, have led to it. "The danger of our day," says Kliefoth in his journal, 1858, issues 10–12, pp. 709, 710, "does not lie in false legalism; on the contrary it lies in antinomianism — in this, that no one will bow with heart and soul before objective truth, objective law, objective order; that no one will give himself, with his own small self, to the great objects and lose himself blessedly in them; that people would rather take everything back into their own subjectivity, and from within it arrange and settle things to suit themselves, however they happen to wish — that is the sin and the sickness and the danger of our day." From this very opponent of Rome we shall readily obtain the admission that, for all the necessity and importance of order, this is nevertheless not the main thing, and that through obedience to objec-