# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1851_S171
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 171 —

belong through him to the true Church, which no one knows except God
alone. By synecdoche, that is, by that figure of speech in which the
part is put for the whole, one also calls a whole congregation, in which
the Word of God is preached purely, a true, orthodox church; this
nevertheless always remains a figurative way of speaking. But if one did
not call it so, one would be denying the true congregation of the saints
that lies hidden within it.

Where, on the other hand, the Word of God is obscured and falsified by
various errors, such a visible community cannot be called the true,
orthodox church — although it cannot be denied that the true Church lies
hidden even among sects and factions, even under the Roman Antichrist,
so far as at least the text of Scripture and of holy baptism still
remains among them, from which true children of God can be born. Only
among those who essentially deny, blaspheme, and persecute the Word and
sacrament is no Church of God any longer hidden.

The Church — that is, the truly believing and sanctified children of God
— must therefore be sought not preferentially in one particular church,
but in the entirety of those who are called. Although we ascribe to our
Lutheran Church, with full right, the glorious distinction of being the
church of the pure Word and sacrament, and although we must therefore
make it every person's duty, for the sake of his salvation, to seek her
fellowship and hold to her: we must not, for all that, presume to assert
that we find the Church exclusively in her alone — indeed we must
condemn it as an error if someone held to the Lutheran Church only
because he believed he could find the congregation of the true saints in
her alone. Those who regard the Lutheran Church as one that has
constituted itself a separate church precisely because it sees no church
outside itself in fact turn it into a sect. Just as it never occurred to
Luther to separate himself from the true Church hidden under the papacy,
so too it must never occur to a true Lutheran, through his adherence to
the Lutheran Church, to cut himself off from those who are illuminated
by the light of true faith, in whatever ecclesiastical communions they
may lie hidden or, so to speak, held captive. Our fathers, the
confessors of the Book of Concord, silence not only the particularist
Lutherans of the present day but also their opponents — those who cry
out as "exclusive" everything that insists on a closed and decided
confession — when, in their preface, they so solemnly and earnestly
protest that their condemnations are meant to apply not to those who err
out of simplicity and do not blaspheme the truth of the divine Word,
still less to whole churches, but solely to the false and seductive
doctrines and their stubborn teachers and blasphemers. Their example can
thus teach how un-Lutheran the itch to condemn is.

This led to a discussion of the concept of "heretic." Only he can be
regarded as such who has judged himself (Titus 3:10) — that is, whose
conscience has been so convicted and overcome by a clear, sunlit
presentation of the truth that it must say to him: you are dishonest and
will neither hear nor tolerate the truth; and who at the same time seeks
to spread his error and gather a following for it. It is thus by no
means the case that every erring teacher is at once to be branded a
heretic.

On the occasion of the fourth thesis, that the congregation of believers
and saints is the true possessor and bearer of all heavenly goods,
rights, offices, and powers, a lively discussion arose