# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1851_S180
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 180 —

had complained of major abuses in church discipline and demanded that everyone Pastor Winkler had banned since the previous year should recant suitably the following Sunday; failing that, they would have to look elsewhere for help. Thereupon Pastor Winkler had asked them to put their names to the document and to submit a faithful copy of it to him.

This account, as given by the above-named brothers, was meant in their view to prove that Pastor Winkler had indeed given the complainants a hearing, since he had let their document be handed to him and had declared himself willing to have the matter examined before a committee. But it was pointed out to them that, according to Matthew 18:15, "not hearing" means specifically not acknowledging the sin for which one is being reproved by one's brother. This Pastor Winkler had clearly not done, since to this very day he does not acknowledge what he is accused of. The brothers Baierlein and Clöter thereupon declared that, if the word used by Professor Crämer had carried this sense, they would withdraw this point; they had understood it to mean that Pastor Winkler had not given them a hearing at all and had been unwilling to enter into any negotiations.

The second point of accusation — that the complainants' document against Pastor Winkler contained no appeal to God's word, but only complaint, demand, and threat in the harshest manner, and so on — the named brothers dropped without further ado, because the document was available in the original, from which the Synod satisfied itself that it did indeed contain an appeal to God's word, namely from 1 Peter 5:3 and Matthew 18:15.

The third point of accusation was this: Professor Crämer had notified the malcontents of his arrival, but not Pastor Winkler; those people, though perhaps instructed to do so, had kept the letter secret and, on Crämer's arrival, pretended to have received it from the post only the day before. But even then, they said, Professor Crämer had not gone straight to Pastor Winkler, but had first held meetings behind his back and had only turned to Pastor Winkler toward evening on the second day, not to ask for clarification but only to rebuke and confront him. This accusation too Baierlein and Clöter withdrew, since it turned out that any suppression of the letter was entirely unproven and unfounded, because it had been delivered unsealed by the post, before Professor Crämer's own eyes, after his arrival in Detroit; further, that Professor Crämer had already gone to Pastor Winkler early the next day, but had not found him, since he was traveling in the countryside; further, that Professor Crämer had by no means held meetings, but had only received visitors at his lodging, telling people expressly that he could do nothing until the committee, which both parties were to choose, had been formed; and that, altogether, before the actual break with Pastor Winkler's congregation, no official act had been performed among those people by any outside pastor.

In the fourth point of accusation, Baierlein and Clöter cite the following sentence from Crämer's report: "The complainants insisted that the matter should be decided by an impartial tribunal; that for conscience's sake they could not join Buffalo, but had good confidence in our Synod." They accuse this sentence of untruth on two grounds: 1. That the malcontents themselves had the Pastor