# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1853_S256
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 256 —

...by setting up a party tribunal disgraceful to the Lutheran Church.

2. Accordingly, the first step toward true peace is that it be initiated
with reconciliation — namely, that the Synod of Missouri extend us its
hand by giving up its sinful party-judgment against our excommunicated
church members and releasing them from its fellowship. This abolition of
the wrong is what effects reconciliation.

As reconciled Christians we can then seek doctrinal peace and complete
unity in spirit, with mutual respect and love, because the way to it
will have been cleared by removing the wrong done. The Venerable Synod
of Missouri deceives itself if it thinks we believe that, by removing
the wrong, it would be looked down upon by us over doctrine — for we
love the brothers who name and confess the name of Christ and turn away
from injustice.

3. It is improper for the Synod of Missouri to recount various
*colloquia* [formal doctrinal conferences], such as the one at Marburg,
etc., and then, citing 1 Peter 3:15-16, to invite or demand that we
answer for our faith and our hope before it with gentleness and fear!
That we have always done, and gladly, in every severe persecution, and
the enemies of the Church have always been put to shame by our poor,
simple confession. But to let ourselves be summoned by our excommunicated
church members — and, what amounts to the same thing, by their
longtime allies — we have no command in Scripture to do, just as St.
Paul had no command to let himself be summoned by the smith Alexander to
answer for his faith. 1 Tim. 1:20 — 2 Tim. 4:14. For here it stands:
"Avoid such people!" 2 Tim. 3:5; 1 Cor. 5:13; 2 Thess. 3:14; Rom.
16:17-18.

The word the Venerable Synod of Missouri stresses — "Be ready to give an
answer to everyone" — quite rightly refers to those who have the power
or the right to demand such an account, such as authorities, superiors,
and the like, toward whom we are indeed to act with gentleness and fear
without fearing their defiance (Matt. 10:18, etc.); but by no means are
our excommunicated, factious church members to be understood as
"everyone," for of them we have the command: "Avoid such people."

So, other things being equal, Christian colloquies can always be held.
With actual unbelievers — such as Zwingli, Beza, Gretser, and the
apostate Pistorius, etc. — they usually accomplish nothing; within the
believing Church they are often salutary, as, for example, the history
of the Formula of Concord shows. But this very instructive period also
shows that no Lutheran church accepted members excommunicated by
another, for all their differences in doctrine. The era of the Pietist
controversies shows the same, and where an individual Pietist here or
there did otherwise, it is condemned as an abomination by the blessed
Dr. Löscher in his *Timotheus Verinus*. No excommunicated person was
ever permitted to set himself up as judge, together with another local
or territorial church, against those who had excommunicated him. So the
Synod of Missouri, too, ought to abandon this injustice, if it wishes to
confess the name of Christ.

4. It is also a wholly powerless excuse to say that we hold dangerous,
though not fundamentally subversive, errors, for the sake of which the
witnesses of the truth — the Christians who recognize the truth — must
separate from our...