# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1859_S303
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Correspondence to Germany. 303

the judgment of others, those who have more gift and better understanding of the matter. But that is not merely possible under our polity — it is practiced with the utmost diligence, as you yourself in part acknowledge, and as we shall further show below. No, your misgivings, without your knowing it, spring at their innermost root from something quite different, as the end of your letter clearly shows. However much the individual congregations still stand on the one and the same ground of the confession; however much they still bear with one another in love; indeed, however much they, in their zeal to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace and in their sincere striving to let their gifts be shown for the common good, actually join together into a free fellowship; however faithfully within it they search out the gifts and powers suited to a fatherly oversight, however humbly they desire the counsel and help of such men, and however simply they submit themselves to the rightly applied and clearly presented Word — none of that does it, none of that can help in the least, for there is still no church there, still no church government there, but in the end only a dissolving spirit of subjectivity, of presumption, of independentism. Dogmatically, indeed, the church is a free communion of faith; dogmatically it is correct that, wherever even only two or three are gathered in the name of Jesus, all the rights and goods that the whole church has are perfectly present; the classic statement, "it is enough," etc., of the Augsburg Confession, and the other, "therefore the church can never be better governed and preserved," etc., of the Smalcald Articles, indeed has its symbolical warrant — but from the standpoint of church order all of that looks quite different: there the church is essentially a communion constituted by polity; there the local congregation has its rights only so as not to make use of them, for it is after all no church, but only a congregation, which must first have the church set over it; there true unity does not by any means consist in the one faith and confession, but in the one form — and not merely as that form happens historically to exist in this or that churchly communion, but as it, where it does not yet exist, must necessarily be established; there the best church government does not consist, say, in being constituted under the one Head, Christ, etc., but in standing under a churchly authority to which obedience is due, in the first place, because it is that authority, not because God has said so. Now, those are simply the bare principles of hierarchy as they are stamped upon the papacy and as they are being pursued by the false Lutheranism of our day. And — we cannot conceal this concern from you — you too, dear friend, without wishing it, are still caught in part, through that evil little device that holds the very same churchly matters to be essentially one thing from the dogmatic standpoint and again something else from the standpoint of church order, in these very views which you yourself reject in principle; and that is what clouds your sight, what makes it so hard for you to understand us rightly, and what makes you fear such dreadful things behind our innocent polity, conformable as it is to Scripture and to the Symbols.