# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S246
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

246   Pastor Löhe's Position toward the Buffalo Synod.

that such glossers-over of their crimes will likewise not prosper, Prov. 28:13, and that they cannot use the Sacrament worthily either, but become guilty of the body and blood of Christ, 1 Cor. 11:27. But if nothing is accomplished by such admonitions, and the person stubbornly denies the deed concerning which he is under common report, then this matter is to be committed to God and absolution is not to be refused to him who asks for it. In His own time, if it so pleases God, the truth may well be brought more openly to light by other means. The power of the keys is given not for the investigation of secret sins, but for the healing of manifest ones." (Tractatus de casibus conscientiae p. 1123. 24.)

Pastor Löhe's Position toward the Buffalo Synod.

In the Mittheilungen aus und über Nord-Amerika edited by Pastor Löhe, No. 4 of the present volume, there is found a notice of the 5th Synodical Letter of the Buffalo Synod, signed E. L. In it we read, among other things: "It will not be unwelcome to the friends of the Lutheran Church in America to learn from a brief survey of the contents of this document how matters at present stand in the Synod of Buffalo, especially since in recent times the friendly relations between our own people and Pastor Grabau have greatly increased ... It is a pity that this brief account too, which closes with hopes of peace, is shot through with so sharp a bitterness. Such deeply cutting expressions as, for example, 'factious brutality,' stand out far too glaringly against the plans and prospects set forth in what follows.*) ... In the second part of the address that follows, under the heading 'the misfortune,' the danger arising from the Missourian doctrine of the Church is set forth very strikingly (!) and thoroughly.**) ... When it is said that in Matt. 18, in the words 'tell it unto the church,' the heads of households are meant, and likewise that the 7 almoners of Acts 6 belonged to that estate, there is no ground whatever for this, nor, so far as I know, can any indication be found anywhere that St. Stephen was a head of a household. The right of the third estate, that of the civil authorities, to come forward in a special way in the constitution and government of the Church is derived from Rom. 13, where indeed the God-pleasing conduct of a Christian toward the government is spoken of, but by no means

*) Should not the German brethren at last see from this that Grabau's offers of peace, which are every time like an earthworm with a deadly fishhook inside it, are nothing but hypocrisy and play-acting?

**) Probably the "misfortune" in Bavaria too has its ground in the Missourian doctrine of the Church, to which Dr. v. Harless is well known to pay homage — indeed, a doctrine which in its main features is contained in Löhe's own Three Books on the Church.