EC6: Church in proper sense; Harrison's "disconnect" (1866 Missouri)

     This continues from Part EC5 (Table of Contents in Part EC1), a series restoring availability of English translations of several of Walther's convention essays that have seemingly been abandoned by Concordia Publishing House. — This essay is the first of eight which are the majority of Theses in Walther's book The True Visible Church. These Theses were previewed in advance of the convention in a Der Lutheraner article, vol. 22, pp. 186-187, so the convention was familiar enough to have questions prepared. The book was written "for the convention … at St. Louis, Mo., October 31, 1866", but the next seven convention essays continued on from this first essay, which dealt with Theses I-III.

     The writer of the Forewords to the 1992 CPH Essays I, Prof. Charles Arand, wrote (p. 14) that Walther "draws many, and at times seemingly tedious if not hairsplitting distinctions", yet he at least acknowledged that "The patience and effort it takes to 'plow' [?] through these lectures will be greatly rewarded." It is sad for me that Arand was picked to provide these Forewords because he has virtually ignored Walther for the rest of his professional career.

      This essay is a perfect compliment to my blog series on Walther and the doctrines of Church and Ministry as it provides clarity, and answers several questions.

Notable Quotes:

44: "…the expression was not correct when one said that belonging to the visible orthodox church was necessary for salvation."

50: "Never again are the means of grace, Word and Sacrament, the constituent parts of the Church, and therefore do not belong to the definition of its essence."

50: "The believers make up the Church, [but] the wrong understanding [of the Church] … would have it that the definition of the Church is the gathering of believers around the Word and Sacrament or the orthodox preaching ministry. … Romanizing Lutherans [do not deny this wrong understanding]"

56: "…the Third Article, according to Luther, speaks only of the invisible church".

58: "the Synod expressed its astonishment that there could still be Lutheran theologians today who claim that the doctrine of the church was not yet properly developed at the time of the Reformation, that it still needed to be perfected. [e. g. Loehe] Luther could not have waged the battle against the heresies of his time, which among other things concerned precisely the point of the church, if he had not known exactly what the church actually was according to God's Word."

61: "All the misery, all the confusion in the dispute about the concept of the Church came from the fact that this sentence was not held fast: The church is the congregation [Gemeinde] of saints."

65: "But as long as the preaching of the Word is still there, we can still believe with certainty that the Church is still there, i.e. the children of God through faith, no matter how horrible things may be in life.".

 72: "Dr. Luther deliberately never used the word 'church' [Kirche] in the German Bible, but always 'congregation' [Gemeinde], in order not to encourage the pope, who had made it so that 'church' was understood to mean him, the pope, and his bishops. This, too, is one of the errors of the false Lutherans of our time, that they also make a distinction between 'church' and 'congregation'." [Cp. to Pres. Harrison's statement against J. T. Mueller's translation here on this point, that his translation of Walther was a "disconnect" with Walther's intent. Since Luther never used the word "Kirche" in his Bible, Mueller was correct in sometimes translating it as "congregation" where it was necessary. It is Harrison who is "disconnected" with Walther and Luther. Walther at times uses the terms "church" and "congregation" interchangeably. The reader is especially encouraged to read the section on Thesis III here.]  

The following presentation provides links to each individual page of the original German publication. It follows the paragraph breaks of the 1992 CPH translation:

This file may be directly downloaded >> here <<; German original text >> here <<.

In the next Part EC7…