# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1857_S313
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 313 —

publicly admonished to repentance by the Lutheran Church over Lutheran
doctrine and the practice that goes with it. The synods of this land, with
one exception, despise us in part as outdated and rusted-out orthodoxists
and dead formalists, or at least look upon us with distrust, as stubborn,
haughty heads with whom, once and for all, there is simply no getting
along. Only individual persons, here and there, gradually draw near enough
to deal with us. In the old fatherland we have few friends. Those who hold
authority treat us more or less — insofar as they, from their height, deign
to take any notice at all of our wretched, unlearned little band — the way
the lofty minds in the marketplace at Athens treated the holy apostle
Paul; while at the same time we are regarded and held up by our own former
best and once so zealous friends and co-workers there as ingrates who have
renounced all "piety" toward their fathers and benefactors.

This is, roughly, our position — made all the more endlessly difficult
by the fact that, God knows, so many of our congregations, caught up in
intolerable dullness of spirit, give our struggle, and indeed the church's
general concerns as a whole, not the slightest attention, or at best only a
grudging one; nor is there any lack of members to whom our earnestness is
distasteful, and who prefer a carnal, comfortable ease, and a shameful,
enervating peace that kills the soul, to a struggle worthy of honor for the
highest heavenly goods — who wish to live without dying with Christ, to
reign with Christ without suffering with him.

Thank God! None of this has been able to lead us astray so far. The
afflictions that have fallen upon us in and over this struggle have
neither muted the voice of our testimony, nor — as so easily happens when
shared afflictions persist — loosened the bonds of our fellowship. As we
were brought together by the one faith, so we have also been held together
by that same faith in love and loving obedience, and have thus stood
together in the fight for the faith once delivered to the saints. Our
comfort in this was the testimony of a good conscience before God, that by
this way — which they call a sect, a faction, a heresy — we nonetheless
serve the God of our fathers, believing all that is written in the Law and
the Prophets.

And now, my dear brothers, do we wish to maintain this position
further, and to keep striving, with God's gracious help, to carry out this
task henceforth — or do we wish, with at least the confession in deed that
we have presumed too much, to let both task and position go?

You will pardon me my foolish question. You know well that I do not
ask it as though I harbored even the faintest thought of any possible
hesitation on the part of the Reverend Synod in answering this question.
Rather I ask it so that, from the very outset, it may stand plainly before
every eye what, in my opinion, chiefly matters at this present convention
as well — namely, a firm, assured heart and conscience bound up in God's
Word, a fresh, God-trusting courage, and a correspondingly undaunted, open,
and honest confessing and acting. This, too, was a chief reason why I took
the liberty of reminding the dear brothers of the Synod's founding, and how
and to what end God the Lord brought us together and has kept us together.
This time's