# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1856_S334
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

334 How are truly Lutheran congregations founded and raised up?

The question would now be how the Lutheran pastor is to show the evangelical character when — be the original case a private offense or a public scandal — the guilty party now already stands before the assembled congregation.

As concerns first of all the pastor's address to this latter person, this will of course be governed by how the one to be admonished has conducted himself: he appears either insolent, defiant, and maliciously hardened, disposed only to mock, not to be reconciled with the congregation; or already broken and contrite in heart and conscience by the Holy Spirit, so that he penitently recognizes and confesses his sin even before the congregation and earnestly and urgently begs forgiveness for the scandal given; or he is, as it were, in a middle state, so that he appears neither hardened by the devil nor especially broken by the Holy Spirit, or he lies under urgent suspicion of feigned repentance.

In the first case, he will prove the evangelical mind, which always aims at the honor of God and the neighbor's amendment, precisely by applying the hardest thunderbolts and the sharpest threats of punishment of the divine Law, especially from the prophets' words of judgment, in order, where possible, to break the hard heart; in the other case, which unfortunately is rare enough, it will at the same time be his own heart's delight and joy to raise up the penitent sinner again through the most lovely and sweetest comfort of grace in the Gospel; in the third case, it will be his task to apply, in appropriate measure, partly the sharpening Law and partly also the alluring Gospel in such a way that, God willing, the sinner now penitently recognizes both that and how he has hitherto let himself be led to repentance neither by severity nor by God's goodness, and how it has therefore come about that he has fallen into this scandalous sin and now stands before the congregation and indeed has good cause to ask it for forgiveness.

In the fourth case, finally, there is no other counsel than to hold up to the guilty party, in plain and clear words, the terrible peril to the soul and the abomination of feigned repentance: how it is a grievous mockery of God, the all-knowing knower of hearts, a kind of spiritual suicide, a shameful deception of the congregation, and how, instead of forgiveness, it brings upon the soul God's disfavor and wrath, tribulation and anguish, which God may then easily let swell up into eternal ruin.

Now where a congregation has, with evangelical wisdom, gradually been trained toward the full exercise of church discipline, there the pastor will, in all these cases just mentioned, certainly have among individual members faithful and skilled helpers and co-workers, so that the sinning brother, "rebuked by many," is admonished, entreated, and pressed upon his heart also with tears of the love of Christ, so that he may give room to the Holy Spirit and do thorough and honest repentance toward God and man.