Not in the Church’s Name

Our Lord, whose commands and warnings we are bound to keep, sets out the honor that belongs to an overseer and the ordering of his church when he speaks in the Gospel and says to Peter: “I say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the underworld will not overcome it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven as well, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven as well.” From there, through the turns of time and one succession after another, the appointing of overseers and the ordering of the church run on, so that the church is built upon the overseers, and every act of the church is steered by these same men who are set over it. [a]

Since all this rests on God’s own law, I am astonished that certain people have had the nerve to write to me as though their letter came in the name of the church — when the church is made up of the overseer, the clergy, and everyone who stands firm. Far be it from God’s mercy, and from his power, which nothing can corrupt, that a company of lapsed people should be called the church; for it is written, “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” We do want them all brought to life, and we beg in our prayers and our groaning that they may be put back where they were before.

But if some of the lapsed claim to be the church, and the church is among them and in them, what is left for us but to ask these very people to be so kind as to let us into the church? So they ought to be submissive and quiet and modest — people who have their own sin to remember and God to appease. They should not be writing letters in the name of the church. They should know instead that they are writing to the church.

Recently some of the lapsed did write to me: humble, gentle, trembling, afraid of God — people who have always worked in the church honorably and generously, and who have never boasted to the Lord about that work, since they know he has said, “When you have done all these things, say: We are useless servants; we have only done what we were bound to do.”

That is what they had in mind. They had received certificates from the martyrs, and even so, so that the amends they were making might be accepted by the Lord, they wrote and begged: they admit their sin, they are truly repentant, and they are not rushing at peace recklessly or pushing to have it out of turn. They are waiting for me to come, and they say that peace itself would be sweeter to them if they received it while I was there. The Lord is my witness how glad these people make me — the Lord, who has seen fit to show what servants of this kind and this stature deserve from his kindness.

That letter reached me only lately, and now I read that you have written something very different. So I ask you to sort out, one from another, what it is you want. Whoever you are who sent this letter, put your names on it, and send it back to me with every name written in. I have to know first whom I am answering. Then I will reply to each of the points you have written, so far as my modest position and manner allow.

Dearly loved brothers, I wish you well always, and I hope you will live quietly and peacefully under the Lord’s discipline. Farewell.