# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1857_S394
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

[p. 394]

...[the Son of Man] did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give
his life as a ransom for many. The head of the household and the civil
government have, as such, nothing whatsoever to do with Christ's kingdom;
within it they are no more and no less than all others; and just as, in
their legal sphere — even among heathens and utter unbelievers — parents
as well as magistrates hold their position by divine right, so, through
their admission into the Christian Church as [separate] estates, the
spiritual form of the House and City of God, which is given with the
Gospel, is destroyed and transformed into a kingdom of this world, where
the congregation, like a family, household, or nation, is regulated and
held together by statutes imposed on it from outside. What calamity has
resulted from this — the papacy and Caesaropapism to which it gave rise —
church history has proven. Here the territorial rulers, with their police
power governing the commonwealth, took their place at the head of the
consistories — against their original purpose*) — there the Roman clergy
[took] the helm of Christendom with tyrannical lust for dominion.

No stronger argument could our opponent have given for the necessity,
above all, of a colloquium on doctrine between the two of us, than the
very proposal put to us! The demand that "genuine judicial verdicts,"
along with authority and power, be ascribed to the projected supreme
church court — which stands, in hierarchical fashion, over all the other
bodies participating in it — and that its rulings be carried out "through
the individual synods, church ministeriums, and local church councils,"
Synodical Letter p. 23, and that for this purpose the arm of the civil
authority be invoked and enlisted for aid, p. 24 — reveals the immense
gulf that has become fixed between us and them. What a slavish yoke could
be reintroduced through this murky, unclean channel and laid upon the
necks of the disciples! Must not these confused assertions — which betray
an uncanny, dark spirit and a deranged mind, assertions to which many
nevertheless, blinded by demonic power, still lend credence — lead back
to the man of sin, who is a spawn of Satan? To what has the Church come,
[the Church] which once shattered the summit and bulwark of Antichrist —
who made servants into lords, the wife into a maidservant, and set
himself up as God — that in her very midst people can now arise who
rebuild that same thing, on a smaller scale, within their own walls? We
would indeed be damning ourselves to the abyss of hell if we were to
favor such high treason and not resist it with the utmost earnestness,
with the weapons of the Spirit! The right to examine, to judge, to
determine what accords with the Word of God or not is granted, as an
inalienable and precious possession, to all who truly believe in Christ,
without exception; and to diminish or undermine it in them is a robbery
that the Lord reckons as done to Himself. How could a church court be
made possible out of elements as opposed to one another as Babel and
Zion, Luther and the Pope, Christ and Belial? We must refuse the name of
Christian brother to those who, despite every admonition and instruction
for their conscience, persist in such a wicked, godless undertaking. Let
there be war and strife, when no...

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*) Note. In Luther's time the consistories had no authority to command
anything as churches in their own right; they were merely advisory
bodies in the sense of the old presbyteries. This can be read in
Mr. von Seckendorf and others, and has been conclusively demonstrated by
Dr. Valentin Ernst Löscher.