# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1857_S392
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

[p. 392]

...those members renounced their fellowship [with Buffalo], whether they
were already under the ban or not, and sought out precisely such a
fellowship [ours] in which they found not merely acceptance, but a
practice in keeping with the Lutheran confession — which the Buffaloers,
in turn, labeled independentist and democratic. The sins, then, of which
they accuse us, and which they rightly regard as the practical
consequences of our doctrine, consist in nothing other than this: that we
did not refuse those who sought from us such preachers and the
administration of the means of grace which they could not find among our
opponents. Must it not, then, first be established which is the correct
doctrine in question, before judgment can be passed on whether it was
wrong of us to do, for fellow believers, for the sake of doctrine and
confession, that by which both their souls and ours would necessarily
have been endangered had we not extended to them the helping hand we owed
them? — Added to this is the fact that we must, in any case, decidedly
refuse the demand that we acknowledge the validity of the Buffalo
excommunications, since we already abhor with our whole heart the
doctrine underlying them — a doctrine incompatible with the Symbolical
Books — and the abominations flowing from it; indeed, we firmly maintain
that the ban, as it is exercised there, alone already gives sufficient
just cause to depart from a church that defiles itself with such
persistent abuse of the divine name in doctrine and life. It falls
precisely, and is threatened, chiefly against those who protest against
it; exceptions are either, especially when from an earlier time, merely
doubtful, or prove nothing but the fear of provoking the influence of
opposition all the more strongly. If, and as long as, those through whom
the ban takes place were indeed to be tolerated along with it —
especially since they could still receive the sacraments in substance —
then it would be more advisable for them, according to Article 8 of the
Augsburg Confession, to remain in their previous fellowship, in order to
go on honoring the truth in word and deed continually. But since that
first precondition does not hold here, it is not merely no sin, but
rather God's command, to withdraw from those who cause division and
offense contrary to the doctrine which they have learned, Rom. 16:15 [as
printed]. It follows, then, from all this, as from the above, with
indisputable right, that our opponents have, for now, nothing else to do
but submit themselves to a colloquium on doctrine with us.

As for the proposal of a general church court itself: in the first
place, it rests, in its foundation, on the doctrine of the three estates
[*die drei Stände* — the household, civil, and spiritual estates] that
the Synod of Buffalo lays before it — a doctrine that, according to our
Symbolical writings, is a glaring contradiction of the Gospel, which
recognizes, purely and simply, no distinction between subordinates and
holders of power in the kingdom of grace, such a distinction belonging
rather to the kingdom of nature and of the law. Grabau's proof of the
divinity of the institution he intends rests, namely, on [divine]
institutions, p. 11ff., which are indeed established by God through His
Word, but which only concern one another insofar as the domestic and
civil estates are, through the office of preaching, summoned to the
kingdom of heaven and the bosom of Christendom, and therein sanctified
according to their persons — whose respective domains, however, are
otherwise to be kept distinct, like earth and heaven, the temporal and
the eternal life. The earthly estate and its nature governs the body,
the city, and the household — the spiritual government, that is, whose
sole elements are the word and mouth of faith, of the whole...