Although, according to Luther, the inward organisation of the
Brotherhood referred to above was a matter of indifference, and the
approaching end of the world admonished him to suffer and wait to see
what Christ willed to do with it, yet we read in other passages of
his writings that it is necessary to work and to make great efforts
to provide every city with a bishop or elder to preach the Gospel;
“every Christian” is bound to help towards this end, both by personal
exertion and with his goods, and more particularly the secular power,
the authorities, whose duty it is to protect the pious. Those who are
now already parsons may, indeed must, at once “withdraw from their
obedience, seeing that they promised obedience to the devil and not to
God.”[274]
This is certainly “something more than passive suffering and waiting
for the end.”[275]
The apostasy of the clergy, which had begun, made the question of
definite, external organisation a pressing one, for the new preachers
and the clergy who were coming over had, after all, to be responsible
to someone and had also to be maintained; it was also necessary that
they and their followers should receive external recognition for
their Churches and extricate themselves from the numerous ties which
united so closely the spiritual with the secular in Catholic life. The
appointment of pastors and the representation of the faithful by them
was one of the factors which called for further organisation of the
Churches: another factor, as we may notice in the case of Wittenberg,
was the manner of celebrating the Supper. It was, as a matter of fact,
the trouble at Wittenberg under Carlstadt which impelled Luther to
take into serious consideration the establishment of an independent
ecclesiastical organisation in that town, and which called for a
definite system of appointing the Lutheran pastors even elsewhere,
so as to prevent Carlstadt’s followers from getting the upper hand
throughout the country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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