# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1853_S260
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 260 —

...testify to this. We, on the other hand, still require proof from
them that, during the dispute over doctrine, they had the right and
power to accept our excommunicated members as witnesses of the truth
against us, as accusers against us, and as judges over us, and to unite
with our banned members against us — praising their demonstrated
hostilities outright as zeal for the Christian confession, supporting
them in their factious hatred and besetting sins, and bidding them to
build their altars against ours! For this reason a Christian conscience
demands that these sinfully received people be dismissed.

Disputes over articles of Christian doctrine have often occurred within
the believing Church. From mere dispute, as it now stands, no schism or
division of the Church follows, since it can, other things being equal,
be rightly discussed and settled among fellow believers from time to
time. Our synod already recognized this in 1845 and wrote in its
synodical letter: we did not wish to be separated from the Missourians
on account of the doctrinal difference, if they would remove the
factious preachers.

Yet the offensive and injurious practice of the Missouri Synod never
ceased, in that it set up, without further ado, factious counter-altars
in our parishes in order to disturb our congregations. Accordingly, it
is the Missouri Synod that has brought about a division. In our eyes,
the doctrinal dispute, however justified, ought not to constitute a
schism; only the Missouri Synod has wished to stamp it as the cause of a
schism, by slanderously branding us as heretics, so as now seemingly to
excuse the factious counter-altars it had built.

The Venerable Synod of Missouri thinks that it asks merely for a meeting
at which it does not make it a condition that we admit something of the
accusations against us. That is good. We likewise ask for no meeting in
which we make it a condition that you admit our accusations in advance.

We ask only that you first make such a meeting possible, and open the
way to it, by abolishing your hitherto self-assumed tribunal of force.
Once this is abolished, then — other things being equal — accused
parties can meet accused parties and negotiate.

The Synod of Missouri, however, is untruthful and presumptuously
domineering toward us. For it falsely presents itself as one that had
merely made accusations against us, without even demanding that we
first acknowledge them as well-founded! But these are not mere
accusations made against us; rather, on the strength of accusations, you
have acted in public practice in a way not found even among civilized
and fair-minded heathens — shamefully, to the point of horror! You have
received the most abominable excommunicated sinners without any
inquiry, declared our Lutheran pastors deserving of deposition, and
imposed it on our church members as a sacred duty to call orthodox
pastors at once — that is, Missourian ones!

You have sought, with fanatical self-assumed force, to destroy our
Christian congregations, so that only God alone, in righteous
displeasure, has so far withstood you, preserved our congregations, and
established them all the more firmly. It is that self-assumed force and
false tribunal whose abolition we demand of a synod that wishes to be
called Lutheran here above all others. For conscience demands such an
abolition, and therefore all Lutheran Christians, the whole Lutheran
Church, and especially all Lutheran synods of this land, must demand it
too. And this is why it is wrong to claim that such an abolition would
be against your conscience.