# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S183
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The uproar over the latest Upper Consistory General Decrees in Bavaria. 183

and of churchly discipline was so universal as has now come to light, when one — did not touch discipline itself, but only the question of discipline, and that with a single finger: this people did not know, this they did not believe; only those knew it who had long since, driven by God's Word and command, attempted it and had thereby made the bitterest experiences of their office. Those, accordingly, were neither surprised nor shaken by the latest events. Not surprised, because they had long known from experience the disposition of the present congregations, and that disposition is none other than the settled will: There shall be no Christian discipline among us! And they were not shaken by these latest events, because they had long been resolved to conduct their office only according to the Word of God, let it fall out as it may. For let him know it who wishes to know it, that to exercise Christian discipline is not man's affair, but God's. That it does not lie in the arbitrary choice of a consistory or a pastor or a Christian whether they will exercise discipline or not; it is commanded to them all in Matthew 18:15-18, to each one in his own part, and where they omit it they sin and must answer for it, each in his own part. Besides the passage just cited, sayings such as 1 Timothy 6:3-5, 2 Timothy 2:24-26; 4:1-5, Titus 3:10-11, 2 Corinthians 6:14-18, 2 John vv. 9-11, 1 Thessalonians 5:14, 2 Thessalonians 3:14-15, 1 Corinthians 5:11-13 — which the reader should by all means look up and ponder well — are too clear and too weighty for an honest Christian heart to be able to evade them. Nor are they given only to pastors and shepherds of souls (although to these especially, precisely for the sake of their particular calling), but also to every individual Christian as well as to whole congregations, as their content and the connection in which they stand in Scripture make plain enough. And therefore, where church discipline is to be exercised, the whole congregation, or at least the greater part of its members, must exercise it as a duty of love toward the neighbor. But for that reason it is not as Dr. Fabri gives to understand in the essays which he recently furnished to the Allgemeine Zeitung on this subject, and which contain so much that is fine and true — it is not the case that one must therefore let church discipline lie, because our congregations are not of such a kind as to administer discipline among themselves according to Matthew 18, and that one must wait with it until a congregation has been so far awakened and advanced by preaching and pastoral care that it, like the people of Hermannsburg, itself petitions for the introduction of church discipline. For the indiscipline and the hatred of discipline in a congregation to which or in which I stand does not absolve me from obedience to God's Word, from the obligation to live according to it in my own part and so far as is possible for me under such sad conditions. Or where would it stand written that one had better not undertake a good, necessary work commanded by God at all, because one is not able to carry it out in perfection at once? In that case one might let the whole work of sanctification, in the church as well as in oneself, drop from the very outset. But it will not drop, nor will it lie