# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S144
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

144 The Uproar over the Newest Ober-Consistorial General Decrees in Bavaria.

such as the hymnal, the order of worship, the core of the agenda, and the regional catechism, the preliminary determinations regarding the order of confession, from which I will take out only the sentence that is also printed in the address in spaced type: "The Ober-Consistory is, together with the confession of our Church, convinced and remains convinced that private confession is not a divine command, and is therefore free, yet nonetheless the Church must see to it that people may freely make use of it as a benefit." — So, too, let what has been said about the maintenance of church order and discipline stand, with this conclusion:

The Church, in what discipline in the proper sense means — namely, the fostering of public decency and the rebuking of public offense — does not proceed at all by decrees and ordinances. She knows how to distinguish what belongs to the secular tribunal from what belongs to the spiritual office. "Where Christ," says Luther, "would not have wished to give us, with the keys, any more power to set up external laws and commandments, he might well have kept them himself; Christendom could well have done without them" (Treatise on the Keys, of the year 1530). Least of all does our Church and the present church government desire the establishment of a spiritual jurisdiction and penal authority. The spiritual office may not claim for itself alone what, according to Christ's word in Matthew 18:17, is the concern of the whole congregation, to which congregation a Christian civil authority also indeed belongs. Church and churchly office resolve their task not with police ordinances and police institutions, but with discipline and admonition to the Lord out of God's Word; not with articles of punishment, but with the divine call to awaken to repentance and conversion. To assist in this the congregation with its Christian congregational life is certainly called. If friend did to friend, neighbor to neighbor, what is a Christian's duty, discipline would be well served and the matter would take care of itself. Besides this, praiseworthy congregational customs and congregational usages also help a great deal, the bearers of Christian earnestness and community spirit, and whatever in this respect is still alive here and there, the church government has striven and strives to learn of, so that it not be neglected but rather tended sensibly. But it is not so foolish as to imagine that such customs and ordinances can be transplanted at will by command and by ordinance, and that the congregations can be reshaped by decrees to do what must be the outflow of Christian life. For this life comes not by a disciplinary path, but solely by the admittedly slow path of the gradual introduction into, and settling into, God's word of grace and his holy means of grace. To walk this path and to point it out, the bearers of the office are appointed, and that with all patience. For patience is needed here too, if we are to inherit the promise. —

(To be concluded.)