# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1859_S305
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Correspondence to Germany. 305

is accomplished for Christ's kingdom by a resisting party — be it a pastor or a congregation — being made to submit outwardly to the decree of the Synod or of some churchly authority, without being brought to obedience toward God's Word? Nothing whatever, except that the ulcer which had before broken open, on which healing might have been attempted, or at least the incurable condition recognized and the rotten member cut off, is now plastered over with an external measure, so that it may feed on itself all the more dangerously, covered and hidden, as an inward cancer. No — whatever is not accomplished in the church of God by the Word is not accomplished, even if it were possible to produce an ever so punctilious obedience toward the churchly authorities, although in such cases that would always require either the corporal's rod of the secular arm or an antichristian peg driven into people's consciences. Our very procedure in the chiliastic dispute could have shown you that nothing else is really needed — as indeed nothing else can truly help — than the power of the Word, which by God's grace we have not so far grown weary of upholding; and yet you, misled by unclear views, find in it the opposite, in that you conclude that the Synod, as the church standing over the individual congregations, pronounced from the authority belonging to it as such the supreme arbitral judgment, with which the matter simply had to rest. Your only misgiving is that we have not openly said so, but rather overemphasize the rights of the individual congregations and — as you think — speak, in contradiction to the confession altogether, more readily of congregations than of the church.

Dear friend, it never occurred to us to say what it never entered our minds to do. We emphasize the holy rights of the congregations not merely in opposition to our hierarchists here, but we also educate the congregations toward this end and guide them, in all earnestness, to make right use of these rights, to exercise them according to the will of God. While we thus enjoy an active, vigorous congregational life, we nevertheless remain free, through our constant, resolute driving toward the Word, from all subjectivistic posturing; we plant a humble mind and unity of spirit, and thereby truly meet all presumption and all independentism. But of a church standing over the individual congregations, not only do we know nothing, but neither does Scripture nor the confession of the church know anything. To be sure, there both is and can be a representative polity in the sense now become customary — for otherwise, indeed, every polity is really a representative one — but then, in accordance with the Gospel, the governing body is precisely a representation of the individual congregations, and administers, as has often been said, their rights, not rights of its own which it might have independently over the individual congregations, that is, churches, as the apostolic letters to the congregations show, and as the Symbols — which it almost seems you have overlooked — attest at countless places, the whole Augsburg Confession itself, for instance, where it constantly says: ecclesiae apud nos docent, etc. Now, we have no such so-called representative church government, but