# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1854 06 20_S173
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

173

of the baptized, e.g. those baptized by Jesuits with the help of smelling-bottles, but the assembly of all believers, among whom the Gospel is preached purely and the Sacraments are administered according to Christ's institution and ordinance. To this the Apology adds: “Therefore the true Church is the kingdom of Christ, that is, the assembly of all saints, for the ungodly are not ruled by the Spirit of Christ.” The Lutheran Church has accordingly not sought out and set forth, like a professor, a scholastically correct doctrine of the Church, over which one should further dispute; she had to confess the true Church over against the false. But if one has the true Church, one can then also recognize the false ones. Where pure Word and right Sacrament are, there are also believers, and these are the true Church. But where the Word and the Sacraments are not pure, there is not the pure Church, but yet always still the Church, even if impure and false, like its Word and its Sacraments. Therefore it follows irrefutably from the 7th Article of the Augsb. Conf. that the Lutheran Church indeed holds itself to be the true Church, but by no means the Church in general. Where only Word and Sacraments are, there is the Church. If the Word is impure and the Sacraments clouded, then the Church will also be so, just as surely as men who eat unwholesome foods still always eat food and live bodily. Thus the Lutheran Church has not a narrow, restricted standpoint, as it is often charged with by friend and foe, but a truly ecumenical one (not sectarian). Where only Word and Sacraments are, there she still finds the Church; only where there is merely baptism does the Church vanish from her like a distant point on the horizon. Not as though she denied the Church here; she can only no longer recognize it; she sees here only ruins of the visible Church, but does not deny that in these ruins there still live men who are Christians, indeed she believes it, if one assures her of it; only she does not say: there, among these ruins, the true Church begins, but there it ceases, there it vanishes from sight. How Chemnitz and Gerhard have worked out the breadth of this view in clear courses through history!”

“Undeniably the whole view of the Symbols in regard to the true Church hangs together with the doctrine of the invisible Church. But no proof is needed: the Lutheran Church calls only the invisible Church the true one. That is acknowledged among friends and foes. The Romans, for example, have at all times fought against this concept of the Church, as one well known and constantly and continually held by the Lutherans. Over against the false visible Church the Reformers had to show the true one: they said, the invisible is it. In the 7th Article of the Augsb. Confession the communion of saints with right Word and right Sacraments is not to be understood otherwise than in the invisible sense. We repeat what we have said above, that the Church is not also to be visible, that no one can maintain without complete nonsense; it must, as it enters into the world, also appear in the forms of the world, that is, visibly. About that, then, nothing further shall be said here. The question is only: how does the invisible relate to the visible Church, are they indissolubly bound together, do they coincide, or is the invisible the proper one, the visible merely the outward and improper one, merely entering into appearance, but never corresponding to its proper nature? The Confessional writings accentuate (emphasize) the invisible Church, they call it the communion of saints in the 7th Art. of the Augsb. Conf., and in the 8th they say: ‘item, although the Christian Church is properly nothing else than the assembly of all believers and saints.’ Let one read the further exposition of the Apology in the article on the Church, where the Church is conceived only as a communion of saints. In the whole article Melanchthon, although he does not use the word invisible, speaks only of the holy Church which is in the hearts, which ‘has the Holy Ghost and faith.’ And from then on this doctrine alone runs through the whole Protestant Church. The Protestant dogmaticians distinguish between a Church in the narrower sense (ecclesia stricte dicta), and understand by it the whole assembly of the truly believing and holy, who not only have the outward means of grace, but are also endowed with true faith of the heart and inner regeneration; and between the Church in the wider sense (ecclesia late dicta), as the communion of all the called, who all stand together outwardly in the use of the Word and the Sacraments and are held to be members of the Church. But by no means do they thereby make two churches, any more than the Symbols and the Scripture itself. They know only one Church, that is, the one appearing visibly, ‘but, says Gerhard, we say that the one and the same Church, the whole body of the called, is considered doubly, according to the inward and the outward,’ and he means, as outwardly called and as inwardly believing. But the true Church they call the inward one. I know not one of the old Protestant dogmaticians (expounders of the faith) who taught otherwise. They hold fast to the words ‘One, holy, universal Church,’ which they explain only spiritually, thus of the invisible Church.”

“But one objects †): ‘we must beware of reading the concept of the invisible Church into the Body of Christ at once. When the old Church ascribed to the congregation of the Lord the attributes: one, holy, universal, apostolic, alone-saving, she did not thereby think of the so-called invisible, but of the Church according to its invisible and visible side, of the old Catholic.’”

†) So the Leipzig Conference, p. 66.

The first thing we must reply to this is: the whole Lutheran Church has thought and taught otherwise on this point. All Protestant dogmaticians refer the one, holy, universal only to the invisible Church, as it is also quite impossible to do otherwise. Then, however, if the invisible Church as such had been foreign to the old Catholic Church, one would rather have to correct it in this point, as in so many others, according to Scripture and according to our Confessional writings, than conversely correct our Church with its Scripture proofs according to the old Catholic Church ††). . . Finally, however, we must remark, the old Catholic Church did not yet know the new, visible and palpable Roman Church with its Venetian, palace-like externality. Only the complete externalization of the Church of the Pope could finally let the invisible Church be found as the pearl in the shell. As surely as we do not seek the doctrine of justification in Cyprian and Jerome, so little can we seek the form of the invisible Church in them, or, what is the same, correct our Protestant concept of the Church according to that which the old Catholic Church had. Yes, justification and the invisible Church are correlate concepts (that is, concepts standing in reciprocal relation); where justification is rightly taught, there the Church must be rightly taught, there the invisible Church must necessarily come to the foreground as the true, proper Church. Now among Lutherans it is surely, one hopes, no question that justification was never taught so sharply and truly according to Scripture as by our Protestant fathers. Therefore, however, the pilgrimage into the old Catholic Church for the discovery of the Church is not permitted to a Protestant; such a looking backward means overlooking the riches of one's own Church and giving no room to the unfolding of the Holy Spirit. But this one must in any case also consider: out of the externalizing, ceremonial-legal course of the old Catholic Church the kingdom of the Pope has come forth as a sure proof that that old Catholic concept of the Church is not the right one.”

††) It belongs precisely to the misery of our time that the theologians, when they read the Church Fathers, and perceive that there is found in them much that justifies the Romish Church, then imagine that a new light is now dawning upon them. As if that had not already been clear to our fathers at the time of the Reformation, that the Romanists can indeed adduce much from the Fathers for themselves, only that in those days men had the strength of faith to hold, unconcerned about so-called church ordinances, Fathers, Councils etc., to the bare Scripture! Will our present theologians not gratefully accept the light which God out of great mercy has given again 300 years ago, but despise the divine gracious visitation in the age of the Reformation, they are lost. The conception of the Church, as it prevails in popery, is to man by nature the most natural of all; if one therefore does not let oneself be guided here by divine light of grace, one must necessarily at last fall to the papistical view and lead the Church once more to the same corruption. D. R. d. L.

“We must therefore remain with the concept-