# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 04 19_S66
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— also, that through it no indelible character is impressed upon the ordinand, as the papists teach, nor that it is absolutely necessary for the lawful exercise of the preaching office; so that, where it is not possible to obtain it, a person duly called by the church may also preach and administer the sacraments without ordination; nevertheless, except in case of necessity, it should never be omitted when the preaching office is being conferred — partly because we have no reason to depart from the practice of the apostolic church, in which the preachers were ordained, and as it were consecrated to God, through the laying on of the elders' hands and through prayer (Acts 6:6; 13:3; 1 Timothy 4:14; 5:22; 2 Timothy 1:6), and partly on account of its wholesome benefit. And this is exactly how we, too, regard ordination — neither more highly nor more lowly — and we wish it to be in no way despised or omitted; rather, we are firmly convinced that in our disordered age, when the purity and unity of doctrine has almost vanished, and even the Lutheran Church itself threatens more and more to dissolve into individual sects and parties, it must be upheld in all earnestness, as a blessed means of preserving the purity and unity of the faith among Lutheran congregations, of impressing upon preachers and congregations the high importance of the preaching office, and of helping to propagate in the church, through the divine preaching office, the noblest jewel of pure, unadulterated doctrine. May God, who instituted this holy and exalted office, preserve it unimpaired among us, and thereby continue, ever and again, to gather a church among us as well, that He may be rightly known, praised, and glorified by it, in this life and in the life to come, from eternity to eternity. Amen.

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Editor's Postscript. — From what has been said above, the following conclusion is logically to be drawn: that those preachers who let themselves be hired for only a year, or the like, must not be regarded as called servants of Christ and of His Church, but as servants of men. Thus, among others, Kromayer writes: "By those who hold the right of call, the preaching office cannot be conferred in the manner of a contract, for a certain number of years, nor with the reservation of being able to dismiss the one called again at will. The power to conclude such a contract has nowhere been granted or conceded by God to those whose office it is to call. Therefore neither the one who calls nor the one who is called can regard such a calling and dismissal as a divine one." [Theol. pos. pol. II, p. 530.] The excuse that American congregations are generally accustomed to do no differently avails nothing; for that most congregations here want not servants of Christ but congregation-servants and church-keepers is something the preachers here have brought upon themselves. If all genuinely Christian preachers refused to accept the clause allowing a congregation to keep or dismiss the preacher at will after certain periods of time, the congregations would not only certainly soon fall into line, but this would also otherwise have the most blessed consequences. The congregations would arrive at a better conception of a true servant of Jesus Christ; they would take greater care in calling a preacher, and would not think, "If the one accepted turns out to be a rogue, you can be rid of him again after a year's term." It would also soon expose the ignorant vagabonds who so often here make a trade of the preaching office for their livelihood and hire themselves out like cowherds, and they would no longer, at least, be employed by any congregation of Christian mind. — Someone will perhaps finally object that a call for a short time is to be preferred precisely because there are, especially in this country, so many cases in which it becomes evident shortly after a man's appointment that the congregation was mistaken in him; had such a man now been called for life, his congregation would be in a most evil position, whereas under the temporary call it can quickly rid itself of a bad subject simply by paying out his year's salary. To this we answer: if a congregation calls a preacher for life according to God's order, and the preacher turns out to be a heretic, or leads a scandalous life, the congregation can, precisely then, rid itself of the wolf far more easily and quickly than if it had bound itself to him, by a contract valid in law, for at least a year. As soon as the preacher shows himself to be a wolf, the congregation not only may but must leave and flee from him without further ado, and from that moment on all obligation of the congregation toward the recognized seducer ceases. Such a man has been deposed by God in His Word, and so the congregation, too, may and should regard, declare, and treat him as such.

(Submitted by G. H. Löber.)

The False Teacher Arius and His End.
(Continued.)

4. The End of Arius.

In the previous section we considered the great and important church council at Nicaea, which the blessed Luther rightly calls "the best council" to have been held in the church since the earliest apostolic one. Every upright Christian must praise God that at that time, by so great a cloud of witnesses, the supremely important article concerning the true deity of Jesus Christ and the Holy Trinity was so victoriously defended against devilish falsification and false doctrine, and the purely biblical confession of it was, for all times to come, newly established anew in the church as a bulwark.

To be sure, both older and more recent unbelief has wished to maintain that the actual church doctrine of the divine Trinity first arose at that time, and had not been taught so from the time of the apostles onward. But just as in the papacy the whole of Lutheranism, though it merely restored the ancient apostolic doctrine, was falsely called a "new religion," so as thereby the better to protect the errors — old and long since prescribed as they were — so likewise many rationalist preachers, in order to gloss over their unbelief, would gladly cast suspicion on the Nicene Creed, as though something new and, until then, unheard-of had been introduced in it regarding the Holy Trinity.

Every unbiased Christian can, on the contrary, convince himself from the whole Word of God that, both in the Old and in the New Testament, no other God has been believed in than the triune God, as the Nicene fathers confessed Him. To be sure, already in the apostles' time, under the wise, governing hand of God, all manner of heresies often had to serve the purpose that the opposing truths of God's Word should be more precisely developed and better safeguarded on every side, with reason and counter-reason. But if the apostle Paul, for example in 1 Corinthians 15, sets forth, proves, and defends at greater length the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh against certain false teachers in Corinth, this doctrine was nevertheless, in itself, no new and different doctrine from that already contained in other parts of Holy Scripture. Likewise the Arian heresy was indeed the occasion for the doctrine of the Holy Trinity to be more precisely developed and demonstrated from Holy Scripture by the church of that time; but defiance be declared against the devil, and against all those who would call this doctrine merely a human invention of the church teachers of that day!

But let us return to the history of the church of that time, and ask: what, then, was the outcome of the great exertions that had at that time been devoted to the preservation of pure doctrine? To this the answer serves that, indeed, in a large part of the church, and namely in Egypt, where the Arian controversy had broken out, the peace of the church was restored for several years, and Emperor Constantine did not fail, in a special circular letter, to call upon the teachers and congregations to thank God for such a victory newly won over the satanic kingdom, and now to hold fast, with one accord, to the right confession of the true God. Eusebius of Nicomedia, however, who soon after the Nicene Council became untrue again to the orthodox confession which he himself had at first co-signed, was, by imperial command, removed from his office and banished from the country.

Yet notwithstanding all these successes, the course of events took, already after a few years, an entirely different turn. A certain presbyter, who secretly held with the Arians, had, as father confessor of the