And don’t ever forget that for Luther and for the Reformers, the Church in its true nature is a Spiritual matter Luther also called it invisible; spiritual and invisible is usually the same in him; it is an object of faith and cannot be shown. And so when you tell somebody who criticizes you because of the Church, and you say: “Yes, it is a quite good institution; there are many good people who come out of it; some people in it are much more serious than some secular people; some are very willing to sacrifice, and the moral standards are always very high, on the average higher than other groups in all this you are right, but you don’t speak of the Church. And then the next day you can find that you were much too optimistic and you find out it is rather miserable, what you say. This is not the basis of faith. The basis of faith is exclusively the foundation of the Church, namely Christ, the sacrament and the Word.
This is Luther’s doctrine of the Church. What about the Church offices? Every Christian is a priest, and therefore has potentially the office of preaching and administering the sacraments. They all belong to the spiritual element. But for the sake of order, some especially fit personalities shall be called by the congregation for this purpose. The ministry is a matter of order. It is a vocation like all other vocations, but it is not a state of perfection or of higher graces or of anything like this. No priest is more a priest than any layman is priest. But he is the “mouthpiece” of the others, because they cannot express themselves and he can.
Therefore only one thing makes the ministers, namely the call of the congregation. Ordination has no sacramental meaning at all. “Ordaining is not consecrating,”he says. “We give in the power of the Word what we have, the authority of preaching the Word and giving the sacraments: that is ordaining.” But this is not producing a higher grade in the relationship to God.
The Church government became identical very soon with the state government in the Lutheran countries, and with the society government we call it “trustees in the Calvinist countries. The reason was that the hierarchy had been removed by Luther.
There is no pope, no bishops, no priests, in the technical sense. Who shall govern in the Church? Now of course first of all the ministers, but they are not sufficient; they have no power. The power comes from the princes, or from free associations with society, as we have very often in Calvinism. Therefore the princes are called by Luther the highest bishops of their realm. But they are not to interfere with the inner-religious things; they have to perform the administration the ius circa sacrum, the right around the sacred, but not into the sacred, which remains for the ministers, and every Christian.
The situation which produced this was an emergency situation. There were no bishops, no authorities, any more; but the Church needed administration and government. And so emergency bishops were created, and nobody else could be this except the electors and princes.
Out of this situation, which Luther accepted as an emergency situation, something occurred already, when it began to work, namely the state Church in Germany. The Church became more or less and I think “more” than “less” a department of the state administration, and the princes became the arbiters of the Church in all respects. This is not intentionally so, but it shows that a Church needs a political backbone. In Catholicism it was the Pope and the hierarchy; in Protestantism it was the “outstanding members of the communion” who must take over, after the bishops have disappeared either the princes, or social groups in more democratic countries, or if the princes do not take it.
