# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1855_S329
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded, etc. 329

[illegible], the pastor easily falls into the temptation of dealing with them more harshly, and thereby more of closing and hardening them than of opening and softening them. And therefore, for such and similar cases, the right rule for a faithful Lutheran pastor, one in keeping with the evangelical spirit and the love of Christ, is this: that so long as the evil will of the heart does not lie open and unmistakable in clear, incontrovertible facts, the seat of the evil is rather to be assumed to lie in an error of the understanding and the conscience. With such a loving presupposition, and a manner of proceeding conformed to it, joined with faithful intercession, that more merely formal, initial resistance arising from temperamental waywardness and a disharmonious mixture of the powers of the soul will at last also be overcome, and the one in error will finally, even if by a slow path, be brought to a salutary knowledge of the truth.

Furthermore, in this part of Lutheran pastoral care, it naturally depends not only on the character of the one in error, but also on that of the error itself, and on how the one relates to the other; for just as the relatively best case is that in which wood, hay, or stubble — that is, no doctrinal error that is downright destructive to the soul — is built upon the right, sole foundation, that is, Christ, and such an error is found in a sincere, teachable heart, perhaps through the fault of an earlier teacher, so, on the other hand, the worst case is that in which a foundation-overturning error (as, for example, the denial of the scriptural doctrine of the triune God, of the deity of Christ, of the justification of the sinner before God by grace alone, through the merit of Christ and by means of true, living faith, and so forth) unites itself with a haughty heart and an evil will.

In this latter case — which naturally, inevitably, brings the ban upon itself in the end, if the guilty party will not even hear the congregation — the sharpest caustics and hardest thunderbolts of the divine Word are entirely in their place, to see whether it might yet be possible to shake the hard heart and break the evil will; and even should this not succeed — as here it almost never does — it will still serve as a testimony against them, similar to how Christ pronounces the eightfold woe upon the brood of vipers, the blinded and hardened Pharisees and scribes.

In that first case, a clear and readily comprehensible presentation of the truth, a conversation conducted in a fatherly manner, will usually yield the desired fruit, namely that the one who had hitherto erred abandons the error and lays hold of the truth.

All remaining cases of error, however, which fall between these two extremes, will now, depending on whether they lie closer to the relatively best or the worst case, take the one or the other outcome.

In every case, however, the pastor here has the best opportunity to set before his patient's eyes, and to lay upon his heart, the importance of the one, pure doctrine, by demonstrating to him vividly, partly how