# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1879_S9
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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is indeed written "Wheat Field," but which in reality mostly bears weeds, and just as little as we would let ourselves be moved to call an inn what is a ruin, even if the sign with the name "Inn" had been left standing. We take the same view as the orthodox Church at the time of the Formula of Concord. Then too there were Flacians, Crypto-Calvinists, Antinomians and others, who all wished to be called Lutheran and accepted whatever seemed good to them, according as circumstances required, while the faithful Lutheran preachers rather let themselves be persecuted than keep silent about their false doctrines, tolerate them and associate themselves with them. The true Lutheran preachers kept themselves far from these, and since the false teachers wanted to force themselves upon them, they procured peace from them by means of the Formula of Concord. The false teachers had either to accept this without reservation and thereby reject their own false doctrines, or they fell under the judgment of the Church. But what does it mean to accept the Confessions without reservation? It means to accept them as the first subscribers of the Formula of Concord accepted them. How these accepted them is attested by

The Conclusion of the Formula of Concord, which reads: "Therefore we wish to have testified, before the face of God and of all Christendom, among those now living and those who shall come after us, that this present declaration concerning all the controverted articles set forth and explained, and no other, is our faith, doctrine and confession, in which we by the grace of God will appear with undismayed hearts before the judgment seat of Jesus Christ and give account for it, and will not speak or write anything against it, either secretly or openly, but by the grace of God intend to remain by it: this we have subscribed, after due deliberation, in the fear of God and with invocation of his name, with our own hands."

The church communion that does not accept the Confessions without reservation, indeed that tolerates false doctrine and false teachers, commits a twofold sin: namely, first, that it harbours false doctrine at all, and second, that it wants to delude people that it is nevertheless orthodox; and that is hypocrisy, which takes bitter revenge in that it does not let it stand still but, since every church communion must exercise doctrinal discipline, ends at last in the persecution of the orthodox teachers in the communion. The consistories in Germany, to be sure, also wish to have the orthodox in their midst and would like to keep them; but in the end they are driven by the false-believers in their midst to acts such as Licentiate Stöckhardt had to experience, namely that for the sake of his orthodox testimony against the false doctrines and false teachers he was sentenced to imprisonment for months. From this it is clear enough that if the orthodox teachers and congregations do not