# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1848_S36
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 36 —

...have accepted. But suppose all congregations complied with the
Synod's ordinances even in matters God has neither commanded nor forbidden,
because they had once obligated themselves to do so — though perhaps many
with inward reluctance and resentment — what would be gained by that? In
this way many congregations would take on the shape of Lutheran
congregations without possessing their essence; our Synod might become a
large, well-articulated machine, but not a living organism; the more
successful the outward structure became, the more the inward life would
wither; we would be tending, at the root, rotten trees — plants which the
Father did not plant, and which must therefore be uprooted; we might often
imagine we had accomplished great things, while in God's eyes our works
were empty husks, and our apparent growth would often be nothing but a
stiffening and dying-off in great masses of lifeless forms. Our chief
struggle would soon come to revolve around enforcing man-made external
rules and arrangements, and this would swallow up the true, blessed
struggle for the church's real treasure — the purity and unity of doctrine.
In a word, we would lose sight of our beautiful goal — to build the true
church, which is no external scaffolding but a kingdom of God in human
hearts — and, at best, would bring about our own early dissolution. It is
true that there are also religious communities in this republic that build
themselves up without contradiction under a strictly representative
constitution and prosper in their own way — but why? Because the
congregations are not allowed to come to a knowledge of their freedom, and
their consciences are bound to that constitution by false teaching. But in
our Evangelical Lutheran Church, where we must preach to our congregations
that the choice of the church's constitution is an inalienable part of
their Christian freedom, and that Christians as members of the church are
subject to no power in the world except the clear Word of the living God,
there is indeed good reason to fear the harmful consequences named above
from any restriction of the congregations' freedom — especially in a
republic such as ours.

We have good reason to hope for entirely different consequences,
however, if we demand nothing unconditionally from our congregations except
submission to the Word, to which we ourselves also bow, and if we
accordingly leave them to govern themselves and stand at their side only as
counselors. We need not fear that, in this way, the worldly elements of a
political democracy will invade the church, that a tyrannical mob-rule
[Volksherrschaft] or a "papacy of the people" [Volkspabsthum] will result,
and that we, who are meant to be Christ's servants, would thereby become
the servants of men. How can it be an ungodly mob-rule when the people make
use of rights given to them by God? How can it be a papacy of the people
when the priestly people of Christians, in matters God has left free, will
not let any human being make laws for them, and are willing to obey the
preacher of the Word unconditionally only when Christ himself speaks
through him — that is, when he preaches Christ's own Word? No, a
disgraceful mob-rule occurs only where the people presume to prescribe to
the preacher what he may and may not preach from God's Word; where they
take it upon themselves to contradict the Word of God and to hinder the
conduct of the office according to it in any particular; or where the
people claim, as a privilege for themselves alone, the power to make
ordinances in the church, excluding the preacher from that power, and from
him...