# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1846 06 27_S86
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

but also the apostles. When, among other instances, St. Paul, together with the congregation at Corinth, had put the man guilty of incest under the ban in the name of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 5:1–5), and this man had now sunk into godly sorrow, Paul then also exercised toward him the key that looses, and wrote to the congregation: "Sufficient to such a man is this punishment, which was inflicted of many. So that contrariwise ye ought rather to forgive him, and comfort him, lest perhaps such a one should be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow. Wherefore I beseech you that ye would confirm your love toward him. To whom ye forgive any thing, I forgive also: for if I forgave any thing, to whom I forgave it, for your sakes forgave I it in the person of Christ." (2 Corinthians 2:6ff.) Now if Messrs. Nast and Mulfinger have read this, how could they be so bold as to write, "Neither the apostles nor the early church used it (absolution) in their purest and best days"? Have these gentlemen then not considered that the Lutherans, too, still possess Bibles in which these sun-clear examples stand written, showing that prophets and apostles made use of the power to absolve? We fear these gentlemen thought: we will make no mention of these examples, and will confidently write into the world that no such examples exist; the people are ignorant, and will simply take our word for it; but should these examples be held up against us, we will handle these prophetic and apostolic words just as we handle the words of Christ: we will write so much about them and twist them so long in every direction that at last they are moved out of our readers' sight and the readers are made confused, until finally at least our Methodists come to believe that no example of an absolution given by men is to be found anywhere in the whole Bible. But even if these gentlemen achieve their purpose with many, those who do not let the Word of God be moved out of their sight, and who esteem it more highly than the peremptory pronouncement of a sanctimonious enthusiast, will not be deceived by them, but will flee from and shun them as dishonest, deceitful falsifiers of the most holy Word of God.

As for the post-apostolic period, it is indeed true that one does not yet find, even in that period, the form in which the office of the keys is now administered in the Lutheran Church, but the substance of the matter one does find. It is seen most clearly in the readmission into the congregation of the fallen who showed themselves repentant, that the church, even in the post-apostolic period, was conscious that not only was its ban God's ban, but that therefore, according to Christ's promise and ordinance, its forgiveness was also God's forgiveness. Dr. Guericke writes in his Church History, in the paragraph on the church discipline of the first three centuries: "If those who had been excluded now actually showed sincere repentance, they were at last, in accordance with the apostolic ordinance (2 Corinthians 2:5ff.), after a proportionate period of penance, often lasting years, readmitted into church fellowship through the laying on of hands by the bishop and clergy, with the participation of the whole congregation, and thus, with permission to commune again in the congregation, the absolutio was granted to them.*) From the end of the third century on, the readmission then took on the form that prevailed in the period that followed." (The penitents, that is, later had to pass through four stations of church penance, after which absolution was granted them only once they had made a public confession of their sins.)

*) The church historian Sozomen concludes his description of this process in the Western church with the words: "When the appointed day has elapsed and the penalty, or a certain debt, has been paid, he (the penitent) is absolved from his sins and restored to the people and to the congregation." Lib. VII, c. 16.

The church fathers Tertullian (presbyter at Carthage from A.D. 192) and Cyprian (bishop there from A.D. 248) call such a giving and receiving of absolution "giving and receiving peace," or "the peace of the Lord." The latter writes, among other things, in his letter to Cornelius: "We had been of the opinion... that those who had fallen during the persecution... should do full penance and receive peace in the hour of death's danger. For it was wrong that the church should be closed to those who knocked, and that the help of a wholesome hope should be denied to the penitent and those seeking forgiveness, that those returning from the world should be sent away without the peace of the Lord — since he himself has granted, who gave the law, that what was bound on earth should also be bound in heaven, but that what had previously been loosed here in the church could also be loosed there." Opp. ad. Erasm., p. 5.

A truly convincing proof that in the church of the first three centuries the power to absolve was claimed and exercised is the emergence of a particular sect, the Novatians, in the middle of the third century, whose principle — rejected by the church — was that no one who had violated his baptismal vow by a gross sin, and had therefore been excommunicated (placed under the ban, even if he might obtain forgiveness from divine mercy), might ever again be assured of the forgiveness of sins by the church or be readmitted into its fellowship. A delightful story pertaining to this has been preserved for us by the church historian Socrates. He relates the following: "After the formula of faith had been recorded and signed by the Council of Nicaea in the year 325, the Emperor (Constantine) asked the Novatian Acesius whether he too agreed with this creed and with this determination of the date of Easter. The synod, he replied, O Emperor, has determined nothing new. For the determination of the faith and this time of the Easter celebration have, as I have heard, existed already from before, and since the time of the apostles. When the Emperor then asked him again, Why then do you separate yourself from fellowship? he held up in reply what had happened at the time of the Decian persecution, and set forth the exceedingly harsh principle that those who sin after baptism with a sin which Scripture calls a sin unto death may not be made worthy of the fellowship of the sacraments; they were indeed to be exhorted to repentance, but the hope of forgiveness was to be expected not from the priests but from God alone, who has the power to forgive sins. When Acesius had said this, the Emperor answered him: O Acesius, set up a ladder, and if you can, climb into heaven alone." (Historia Ecclesiastica Tripartita, Book II, 6, 13.) Would that the Methodist Novatians of our day might take this to heart — who, inconsistently enough, hurl their bolts of excommunication vigorously in every direction and declare all non-Methodists unconverted, condemn them, and shut them out of the kingdom of heaven, while wanting to know nothing of absolution, of the comforting key that looses.

Since we now pass over the later period, because the particular question at issue is whether absolution was used in the best and purest age of the church, we let follow here only a few important testimonies of godly church teachers from the time of the Reformation and afterward concerning holy absolution, asking our readers to compare with these what the new Methodist saints write about it, or rather blaspheme against it in their blindness.

Luther writes as follows in his "Warning to those at Frankfurt am Main to Beware of Zwinglian Doctrine and Teachers," from the year 1533: "If a thousand and again a thousand worlds were mine, I would rather lose everything than let the least little piece of this confession be taken out of the church. — The second part of confession is the absolution, spoken in God's stead. — This part is useful and necessary not only to the young and the common people, but to everyone, and no one should despise it, however learned and holy he may be. For who has come so high that he does not need, or may despise, God's Word? And for the sake of this part I make the most use of confession, and will not and cannot do without it, for it often, and still daily, gives me great comfort when I am troubled and distressed. But the fanatics, because they are secure and know nothing of sorrow and trials, easily despise this medicine and comfort, and, moreover, wish to take it away and withhold it from those who need and must have it. If they are full, they ought to let the hungry eat as well; if they are holy, they ought to let sinners become holy too; if they no longer need God and his Word, they ought to leave it to those who still need it. But (as I have said) they show by such raging their great blindness and folly, as those who have never yet learned what God's Word,