# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1850_S119
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 119 —

regard for what is old, and against the rejection of all outside authority and
of proven church institutions, they now again seek to bind consciences to
various human statutes and churchly ordinances as well. In opposition to
the degradation of the preaching office, they fight against the legitimate
and reasonable rights of the spiritual priesthood of all Christians as mere
chimeras of spiritually proud enthusiasts, and they deny to the so-called
laity themselves the right to choose their own pastors, and the right to
vote in synods and church courts. In this same opposition, they further
derive the preaching office from the power of ordination performed by
pastors, which they declare to be a divine ordinance; they make the office
and service of those who are meant to be only stewards of God's mysteries
into a special estate privileged above the priesthood of the laity; they
grant to the preachers of the Gospel a power and dominion *de jure divino*
[by divine right] even in matters that God's Word neither commands nor
forbids; thus they transform the Christocracy of the congregation of the
saints and elect, of the free woman who is the mother of us all, of the
Jerusalem that is above, into the aristocracy of a church-state, and finally
they make the power of the Word and Sacrament dependent on the office
of the one who administers these means of grace.

Now although this latter tendency has for some time already come
clearly to the fore, both in the Lutheran Church of Germany and of
America, it nevertheless remained, until quite recently, without influence
on our Synod. Very lately, however, as you know, we have at last come
into serious conflict with it from two directions. The time when the
members of the Synod could be quiet spectators of the struggle this
tendency has provoked is therefore past. The call to fight, for it or against
it, has now gone out to us as well. —

Now although it naturally cannot be my purpose here to demonstrate the
error of that tendency, I still cannot fail to point out a few things which,
in my small measure of understanding, we should never lose sight of in
our common decision on this matter.

The first is this: this is by no means a matter of adiaphora — of
measures, customs, ceremonies, and constitutional questions on which
Christian wisdom may decide; rather, it is a matter of doctrine, that is, of
something that is not ours but God's, of God's own name and honor
itself — something it is not in our power to yield or relax for the sake of
love or peace; a matter of which a single small point is worth more than
the whole world with all its wisdom and all its treasures; the very thing
by which the true Church alone is recognized; her highest treasure, in
which all her other treasures are contained; the pound entrusted to her,
for whose faithful use and keeping she will one day have to give God a
strict accounting; the purity of that heavenly seed, on whose purity
depends the purity of faith and life, all light of the soul, all comfort of
conscience, and the hope of eternal life. Here, therefore, the old proverb
applies: "*Amicus usque ad aras*" — a friend as far as the altars — ; indeed,
above all, the apostolic admonition now applies to us: "A little leaven
leaveneth the whole lump," Gal. 5:9, and what Luther writes on this in the
following words: "Just as in philosophy, when one errs a little at the
outset, a very great and immoderate error results in the end: so it goes in