# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 12 07_S1017
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Supplement to No. 12, Volume 9, of the Lutheraner.

(Submitted by Pastor Fürbringer in Freistatt and Kirchhain, Wisc.)

A Historical-Theological Contribution

toward a fuller judgment of the disputes between the Grabauites and the so-called Missourians.

(Continuation.)

Accidentally, per accidens, the appearance of the holy Church of Jesus Christ (which in its essence, properly speaking, per essentiam, Hutter compend. p. 412, is only One,) is such because on earth she is entangled with the world through Satan, and from this there arise the various Partial Churches, more or less pure, like the manifold rays of one light, unveiled yonder, but here dimmed by cloud and dark mist, that is, with individual closed confessions, of which, however, some, under the governance of the divine Spirit, express the faith which was once delivered to the saints, and the position of the doctrinal system against heresies that have arisen, in the course of time, toward an ever clearer and deeper knowledge of the Church as a whole through the conflict of opposites in the world, impressa exprimunt, as the Lutheran dogmaticians say.* The invisible can never express itself otherwise than through the visible, Apol. p. 148; only so far has the latter truth, salvation, and life, as it partakes of the former. The concept of the visible embraces solely and exclusively the dispensation of the means of grace, now freer from blemishes, now not, indeed wholly disfigured, nevertheless marks of the Church simpliciter et absolute loquendo, as the dogmaticians speak, J. Gerh. locc. th. V. p. 321 sq. The true visible Church is, by virtue of her Scriptural confession, the representation of the congregation of the regenerate; she is the type of that heavenly City of God where God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes; but the Bride of the Lord, already naturalized there, who hastens amid heavy conflicts here toward this glorious goal, to whom all the promises of Scripture apply, is also born in the wider circles of the coetus vocatorum, which, as communities of the called, presuppose the acceptance of divine grace and of what is thereby continually imparted and acquired in the Church, even if only in a few and by degrees, which then react upon others, until it, as a noble leaven, leavens the whole lump, or a decided Antichristianity comes to light. The incongruence between the visible appearance and the invisible essence of the Church is grounded in the limited and sinful nature of man; in the doctrine of a visible and the invisible Church there lies as little a duality or inner self-division as when I speak of the outward and inward parts of a human person; the totality of all the baptized is touched by the working of the grace of the Triune God, so that the humanity of the Son of God, undivided from the Godhead, is born forth in them, who are nothing but flesh from Adam, and they are transfigured into it; in case of affirmation they become organs of the Spirit, who through Word and Sacrament completes the new man in them, who, serving, sustain themselves and the body and increase the kingdom of Christ; in case of negation they become filth, matter of disease, excrement. It is the vital power of the invisible Church, as the soul, that bears the whole.

* Note. For in the place of apostolic decision in doctrine there necessarily came the endeavor, by virtue of the Holy Spirit continually imparted to the Church, to grasp and set forth the content of the confession in Scripture from its grounds, in order to exclude from the Church everything foreign that pressed in; and without the norm of this eternal confession of all believers no constitution at all can be conceived in the Church.

We must, however, come still closer to the point on which the matter here really turns, and look more exactly at what everything depends upon in this controversy. We mean the question: Is the Church, as to her essence, and therefore also originally as to her origin, a visible or an invisible one? The Symbolical Books answer in the brightest light of divine truth. We wish to develop quite briefly the consequences which that most important question and the differing answer to it entail, according to what we have drawn from this truth. For this is indeed the status controversiae between us and them, as even the most renowned papal theologians admit. According to the latter, as Grabau also must teach, Christ gathered about Himself a band of 12 disciples, to whom He entrusted the office in the Church, gave the promise to be with such office all the days unto the end of the world, and the promise of the Holy Ghost, who should guide them into all truth. (Cf. Grabau's Hirtenbrief III. Informat. Vol. 1. p. 73 ff.) This Holy Ghost they received as a necessary endowment for their office; the words of Christ, St. John's Gospel 20, 21 ff., are to be understood of ordination in such a sense that the imparting of the Holy Ghost here is not essentially identical with that which happens to all believers. (Cf. Inform. Vol. 1. p. 74. Over against this, Luther in his sermons on this text.*

*Note. It is remarkable how the organ of the Buffalo Synod, the church Informatorium, misunderstands and unjustly judges Luther's doctrine of the spiritual priesthood and the office of preaching, and in general holds as of small account what he has taught and written on this subject, even makes it suspect to their congregations, especially his tract to the Bohemians, which he and the Symbols have never retracted, nor have the orthodox teachers of the Lutheran Church ever disapproved, while the so-called Rottirer, even before they called Missourian pastors, highly esteemed the sermons of the Kirchenpostille and used them diligently.

This principal visibility of the Church in such an office, and the given Christian truth, were not to be separated from one another. To a visible communion, therefore, salvation was bound; as from it the doctrine of Jesus was handed down and the mind of the Holy Spirit expounded in it, whatever the communion thereafter, through its continuing apostolic teaching office, ordained, established, and commanded, was divine; the salvation of mankind stood solely with men. But who could be certain that these men did not mix everything with impure additions?—Quite otherwise is it with the Lutheran doctrine. Out of the invisible Church the visible develops of necessity; the former is built up inwardly by faith, and to faith alone is every promise given; it is first of all the immediate product of the triune God Himself; if a Church were otherwise to arise and continue on earth, the Word which God spoke in Paradise, the Lord Jesus to His disciples, dared not remain merely a positive truth given from without, but had to be taken up into the spirit and the will of the hearers; but then such an invisible Church is also the workshop, the living organ of the same God, which He Himself has created for the purpose of His further working; that is her true nature, her proper essence and her own peculiar calling. As now the Word is a divine-human one—for God has spoken it, immediately or mediately, yet always humanly—; and the Sacraments a divine-human action: so also the Church has a divine and a human side at once, the faith of the heart proves itself active in the confession of the mouth and of works, yes, she organizes herself, so far as lies in her, according to the command of her invisible Head, under an ordered pure office of preaching, in which the common confessing of the believers is concentrated. (The separation of the divine from the human, and vice versa, or the letting of both merge into one another, is the mother of all heresy, as in the Person of Christ, so in the other articles of the Christian doctrine.) He who would be saved and be within the realm of the Church, which here contends, there triumphs, must however not seek her in human authority as such, nor wish to bind her to certain places, outward constitution and estates, "Lo, here is Christ, and His