# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1858_S98
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

98 Answer to a Voice from the Lutheran Church of Germany, etc.

church, false doctrine and practice concerning the ban and church
discipline could come to dominate, and souls could thereby be endangered.
Now if you formulate the latter point in this way: "in and of itself it
seems to me beyond doubt: as long as it is conceivable that a false
doctrine and practice concerning the ban and church discipline could, in
some part of the Lutheran church, come to such dominance that souls are
endangered by it, the duty remains for the other parts of the church to
take up the cause of such souls" — then we believe that, in our own day,
justice has not yet really been done to the matter by saying this much.
We plainly live in a time in which people, having lost faith in the
power and effect of the sole, eternal, unchangeable divine authority of
the Word in matters of faith, doctrine, and Christian life, and having
grown despondent about it, wish to prop up the aged, feeble Word with
the authority of the church — a time in which many, even within the
Lutheran church itself, in a genuinely papistic manner, lay hold of
consciences with the church's own authority, and thus seek to shore up
tottering Christianity. In such a case it is necessary not merely to
speak of appearances and conceivable possibility, but, with our faithful
fathers, to declare decidedly and plainly, and to stress properly as
well, that every local congregation, even an orthodox one, can err, and
that what goes out under the name of "the church's" decision, judgment,
verdict, and sentence is, in fact, not really that at all. We are also
firmly convinced that false doctrine concerning the ban and church
discipline does not first need to attain a certain degree of dominance
in order to be able to endanger souls, but that every false doctrine,
especially in these practical matters, endangers souls the way an evil
leaven leavens the whole lump; and since our weak, blunted age has lost,
to a horrifying degree, its conscience regarding the sin of error, it is
doubtless doubly necessary here too to say the matter plainly as it
stands, and to bear decided witness to the truth.

You further find fault with the Buffaloans for refusing a conference
aimed at reaching an understanding on doctrine and practice concerning
the ban and, connected with that, concerning church and ministry. But if
you base this merely on the principle that one owes it to everyone, even
the most hardened sinner, to employ every means to convince him of the
sinfulness of his ways before demanding that he lay his sin aside, then
it would certainly be no less important to point out that, as long as
the doctrine remains contested, the cases in question simply cannot be
finally decided at all. What is at issue here is the application of
certain doctrines, true or false, to practical cases. These latter
cannot possibly be decided unless it is first clear whether the doctrine
on which they are grounded, and by which they are to be judged, is
right or wrong.

If you further hold the view that the Buffaloans, in their vehement
writings against us, have in any case certainly made matters worse, yet
that the tone and language of the "Nothwehrblatt" also did not seem to
you to be the right ones, in order to