# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1854 06 20_S174
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

174

which our Protestant dogmatics has established. Whoever departs from this must go astray, whether they be visible or not. Whoever lays the emphasis on the visible Church, or on the equal interpenetration of visible and invisible, must come to the point of desiring an unlutheran church-office. The necessary consequence of the visible Church is visible priests, bishops and finally the Pope. Whoever lays the emphasis on the visible Church must come to maintain that whoever does not belong to this visible Church “is an enemy,” as not only Cyprian has said, but as also recently Cyprianism has been revived. Whoever thus confuses the visible and invisible Church must, in his emphasis on the visibility of the Church, come to transfer to the visible Church the titles belonging to all Christendom: one, holy, universal. Then, in order to make the holiness of the visible Church also visible, it will have to be maintained that a church, even if it otherwise has pure Word and pure Sacrament, is no longer a church if it has no ban. Instead of two means of grace such a one must provisionally assume three: Word, Sacrament and Ban; instead of two Sacraments such a one must provisionally assume three: Baptism, Lord's Supper and Ordination. What would still have to follow, e.g. the old Catholic penances, a visibly churchly head, a lordly looking down upon the Reformers and their writings, etc., would depend on the bold activity of the times and persons. I shudder at such unprotestant propositions: they will bring us a Lutheran hierarchy, which is utterly contrary to the old Protestant views. Whoever thus sets aside the Symbols and the whole old Protestant body of doctrine with one stroke, since there are only two consistent paths for the Church, an Old and a New Testament one, can do nothing else; he must turn his face straight toward Rome. A Catholic movement is now going through the world, says a renowned Swedish historian: here one feels something of it! But what a wonder! The Roman Catholic Möhler says in his Symbolik (6th edition, p. 425): “yes, certainly these invisible ones, who have passed into the image of Christ and been deified, are the bearers of the visible Church: the wicked in the Church, the unbelievers, hypocrites, dead members of the body of Christ would not be able to preserve the Church itself in its outwardness for one day. The proposition that the inner Church is to be set first and then the outer has a completely true side. We are not living members of the outer Church until we belong to the inner.” Thus speaks a Roman dogmatician, overpowered by the truth of the Protestant doctrine, and we begin to forsake the Protestant doctrine and to - romanize! God help us to right truth and clearness!”- -

Dr. Rudelbach on Ordination.

Yet another shadow side of the German-Lutheran Church.

Dr. Rudelbach, by his decided testimony against Rationalism and Union and for the Lutheran Church and Lutheran doctrine, at a time when almost all who are to be reckoned among the great scholars of our day were silent, has become so great a blessing to our Church that it seems as if the gratitude of a Lutheran demanded that one cast the mantle of love over the failings of such a man. But it is not so. The more gifted a man is, and the more he has gained the confidence of the members of the Church by his other fidelity, the more fruitful also is his error, precisely his. Such great men, as by God's grace they win many for the truth, draw, precisely where they err, commonly an even greater crowd of erring followers after them. Now every error against God's Word is always a deadly poison of souls, which works the more destructively and widely in the Church, the more refined (subtle) it is, and the better the recommendation with which it goes forth as medicine. So we see ourselves, although with deep regret, since we would most gladly only praise a Rudelbach, compelled to point to an error which this man, otherwise highly revered by us, indeed earlier let be glimpsed, but has now developed at length and laid publicly before the Church. This error concerns the doctrine of Ordination and the connected doctrine of the holy Ministry. The exposition of this doctrine from the pen of Dr. Rudelbach is found in the first quarterly number this year of the “Zeitschrift” appearing under his and Dr. Guericke's name. We will indeed not apply to the error of Dr. Rudelbach the saying of Jerome: Haereticorum sententias prodidisse, superasse est, that is, to have made known the opinions of heretics is to have overcome them; yet for this time let it suffice to communicate to the readers only what he teaches contrary to God's Word and the Confession of our Church on the point named.

At the place cited the same writes first among other things as follows: “It is by no means to be approved that men” (on the part of the old Lutheran theologians) “conceived ordination essentially merely as ‘the public and solemn confirmation or, as it were, proclamation of the vocation.’ To show that the laying on of hands does not really matter here (as if any part of a holy act, attested from the first days of Christianity, could be less significant *), they mentioned with special emphasis the fervent prayers.”

*) Also the words placed in quotation are Dr. Rudelbach's words. The same author thus also regards the laying on of hands as an essential part of ordination, and so in this also departs from the pattern of the doctrine of our Church.

In what follows Dr. Rudelbach comes to the well-known decree of the fourth ecumenical Council, held in the year 451 (the Chalcedonian), according to which, quite rightly, no one shall be ordained absolutely, that is, no one before he has received a vocation to a definite office in the Church, because from the beginning, in the whole old Catholic Church, with few isolated exceptions, ordination was not held to be a consecration by which one is received into a certain priestly order, but a solemn public confirmation of the call which one has already received to a definite office. Dr. Rudelbach, however, rejects that decree of the ecumenical Council and, strangely enough, since otherwise so little speaks for his view, gives forthwith the following to consider: “It is beyond all doubt that the Roman Church later, namely throughout the whole Middle Ages, did not hold to it, but year after year ordained thousands without the ordained having a definite office, and merely by suitable provisions (most fully finally by the decrees of the Tridentine (!) Council) took care that those so ordained could find both a sphere of work and a necessary livelihood.”

“If we now, continues Dr. Rudelbach, cast a glance back at the old Lutheran theory of vocation and ordination, it must first be unconditionally conceded that it clearly expresses the sense of Luther and of the Smalcald Articles.” An important concession! But who would think that Dr. R. nevertheless declares himself against a doctrine which, as he himself says, is entirely in accord with the Confessions of our Church, sworn to also by him? But, alas! he now writes among other things the following further: “In the first Appendix to the Smalcald Articles it is said, indeed in passing and without proper archaeological warrant” (that is, without its being provable from ancient history), “observed: ‘that when in the ancient Church the people elected the priests and bishops, the bishop of the same or of a neighboring church came up and confirmed the elected by laying on of hands; ordination was therefore nothing other than such a confirmation and ratification.’” Yet apart from all this, the result of our investigation hitherto must come out as follows. First: that our older dogmatians, as a rule and at least in one direction, mostly from a “well-founded polemical interest in several respects” (thus not in all?) against the Romanists, did not let the concept of ordination come to its full right. Then (if one asks us about the type of presentation which we regard as alone scriptural and fully churchly *)):

*) The reader sees that men in Germany now understand by “churchly” not what, in the sense of our orthodox