# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1853 04 12_S106
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106

Doctrines of Pastor Grabau

fore it is a dishonor to the great God to render the application of His holy Word doubtful, and then to seek the removal of the doubt not with God, His Word and the ministerial office, but in a meeting of the congregation." (Same, p. 16.)

Remark. Pastor Grabau plainly accuses us wrongly here of encroaching, by that principle, upon the power and authority of the Word, since the question here is not about an alleged ambiguity of the Word, but about this: whether, when, for example, the preacher declares something to be sin or false doctrine, and the accused cannot be convinced of it by him out of God's Word, he must nevertheless abide by the decision of his pastor; or whether the matter is not then to be brought before the whole congregation, to which, then, together with its pastor (or pastors), the final decision naturally belongs, which naturally can also bind the conscience only when it is taken from God's Word. It also goes without saying that the congregation is bound to lay the matter also before other orthodox bodies, if it cannot agree among itself upon the ground of the divine Word.

21. "It is erroneous that they teach that the congregation with its preacher has the right to set up public confessions of faith." (Same, p. 16.)

22. Pastor Grabau rejects the proposition: "The preachers of the Unierte church have a false confession, a false Lord's Supper," but — nevertheless they are still in the right office, are still servants of Christ, so long as they only do not say, we are assembled in the name of the King of Prussia." (Second Synodal Letter, p. 124.)

23. "The power, however, of preaching, binding and loosing passes through ordinary means out of the Gospel of the mouth of Christ into the mouth of the apostles, prophets, pastors and teachers. And so it comes forth as an office or church power into daily exercise, and the name 'church power' is then used in no other sense than as the official name of certain persons in the church." (Inform. I, 85.)

Doctrines of the Roman Church.

church prelates." (Bellarminus Lib. 4. de Rom. Pont. c. 1.) "In Matth. 18 it is said: 'If he hear not the church, let him be unto thee as a heathen man and a publican.' But under the name of the church a prelate or an assembly of prelates must be understood. Therefore the final judgment is the business of the pastors." (The same, l. c.) "It has not been deemed good that a layman should have power in the church to decide anything, since the necessity of obeying remains to him." (Papal Law. Cap. Non placuit caus. 16. q. 7.)

21. The Jesuit Laurentius Forer of Dillingen writes in his Compositio pacis: "The Augsburg Confession can be no symbol or confession of faith; for a symbol must be a public confession of faith, whereby, as a certain mark, all true Christians in all places of the world are recognized: but the Augsburg Confession was delivered at Augsburg by some few persons." (p. 40.) To this the old Lutheran Hoe von Hoenegg replies in the "Defense of the Evangelical Apple of the Eye:" "Here no account is taken of the difference between the Symbola oecumenica, or general confessions of faith, and the Symbola particularia, or special confessions, which are directed to certain lands and persons and yet are so constituted that it is free to everyone to accept them and to confess himself to them." (p. 42.)

22. The Benedictine Virvesius calls out to the Lutherans: "Since you cannot have the (true) church without us, how can you have the right call and ordination of church servants?" (See Menzer, Exeg. A. C. p. 637.) In the decrees of the Council of Trent it says: "If anyone says that those who have been neither ordained nor sent according to the established usage by ecclesiastical and canonical authority, but come from elsewhere, are lawful ministers of the Word and of the Sacraments: let him be accursed." (23d Session.)

23. The Cardinal Bellarmine writes: "The whole fullness of power of the church is formaliter only in the church prelates, just as the sight of the whole body is formaliter only in the head" (Lib. 2. de Concil. c. 2.) By the word formaliter it is to be indicated, in scholastic manner of speech, that it is the church prelates by whose full authority the church possesses the dignity of the power which is called church power.

Doctrines of the Lutheran Church.

cannot be decided, shall be judged by the church, Matth. 18: there he surely understands not only the apostles and servants of the Word, much less the mere magistracy, but a whole congregation and those who represent a whole congregation. As also among us the consistories are not wont to be appointed from laymen, or from clergymen alone, but of both clergymen and laymen, in order to have the church court administered by them." (Wittenbergische Consilien II, 136.) "He (Christ) expressly says that whoever will not hear the congregation, him shall one hold as a banned heathen and publican, which is to be understood not only that the church has power to declare impenitent sinners under the ban, but that the congregation has, in all church matters, censures, church punishments, the judging of divisions in doctrine, the appointing of the pastoral office, among other things, the highest power." (Heßhusius, on the Call, etc., p. 51.)

21. So writes the excellent Hutter in his Concordia concors against the Reformed Hospinian, who would not, among other reasons, acknowledge the Lutheran symbols, in which the Reformed errors are condemned, because they were not drawn up by the whole church in a general council: "No divine law, certainly no human law forbids the orthodox from agreeing, also outside of a synod or without the calling together of a synod, upon some pure and unadulterated form of doctrine, and from publishing the same as a symbol of their faith, their doctrine and their confession, with testimonies of collected signatures, and from maintaining it against the distortions and deviating opinions of any heretics whatever." (p. 459.) So writes Heßhusius further: "A small company of 10 or 20 persons that rightly knows Christianity has just as great a power in the kingdom of Christ as a church of many thousand persons." (See Bidenbach's Consilien p. 226.)

22. "We confess that under the Papacy there is the true holy Scripture, true Baptism, the true Sacrament of the Altar, the true keys for the forgiveness of sin, the true ministerial office." (Luther's Letter on Rebaptism. XVII, 2646.) "The priests in the present Greek church are all of them called through ordinary means and are therefore lawful priests." (Wittenberg. Consilien. I, 118.)

23. "The Potestas ecclesiastica" (the church power) "belongs to the church radicaliter" (that is, it is rooted in the church and grows forth out of it), "and is exercised by the teachers according to the commission of the church." (Löscher. See Unschuldige Nachrichten, 1733, p. 978.) "Of the keys there are two, one which looses, the other which binds, which Christ has committed not only to His apostles, John 20, 23., but also to the whole church, Matth. 18, 18., which exercises that its right through the servants of the Word. — Christ, the LORD of the house, which is the church, has given the keys to His bride, who transfers the same to her servants, who are called stewards. . One must distinguish between the right of the church and its exercise. The right to proclaim forgiveness of sins to broken hearts belongs to all; therefore in case of necessity, or where there is a lack of ordinary church servants, anyone can comfort his tempted neighbor with the forgiveness of his sins; but publicly it is not permitted, for the exercise of that right, which takes place publicly, is only with the ordinary church servants." (Balduin in Cas. consc. p. 1104. 11.)

(For the "Lutheraner.")

Scriptural Character of the Lutheran Doctrine of the Lord's Supper.

By the Rev. H. J. Schmidt, D. D., New York 1852. Published by Henry Ludwig.

The above is the title of a treatise which first appeared in the Evan. Review and was afterwards printed separately. The occasion for it was a couple of articles which had appeared in the same periodical, by Dr. Schmucker, professor of theology at Gettysburg, Pa., who attacked the doctrine of the Lutheran church concerning the Holy Supper, and the doctrine closely connected with it concerning the communicatio idiomatum, in a manner as unworthy as it was unintelligent, and made himself known as a Rationalist. The aforesaid work refutes the author of these articles clearly and tersely, and exhibits him, as he deserves, in his nakedness in a manner humiliating to him. In doing so Dr. Schmidt wishes, as is right, to stand solely and alone upon the Scripture and the symbolical books of the Lutheran church, though he also does not disdain to meet Dr. Schmucker on all other fields on which the latter attacks the doctrine. Incidentally he also mentions that, whereas Dr. Schmucker now appeals to the properties and laws of matter in order to regulate his faith by them and to assail ours, the same man in his better years (1826) wrote: "Only a lack of insight and clearness of understanding can induce an honest opponent to charge the doctrine (of the Lutheran church concerning the Holy Supper) with a contradiction, when it denies that the glorified body of Christ has the properties and is subject to the laws which we call properties and laws of matter."

Now while the work here noticed has in general found our full approval, we can nevertheless, with regard to the honored author in some-