# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1882_S72
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 72 —

an almost three-hundred-year consensus as well. Almost all have taught falsely about the Sabbath, except a very few. Likewise with regard to the power of the civil authority in the church they all err. Pastor Muus would of course have to demand then that we hold the same doctrine of the civil authority, that it possesses the right to search out heretics and punish them, at least with imprisonment and banishment. If this doctrine is right, then Congress too must have such a right. You say that I went at you quite terribly. My dearest Pastor! You really cannot complain. How have you treated us in this assembly! You have set out, wherever you found an opportunity, to provoke us, to scold us and to condemn us so sharply that it would have been no wonder if we had jumped up and said: No, we cannot listen to this any longer. Wherever you could bring it in, you said we were Calvinists. We have borne all this patiently, and when we now raise our voice a little against you, that is in your eyes very unchristian. — And I ask you for God's sake, how can you place the dogmaticians beside the Confession? Where in all the world are you getting to? Is the Confession equal to a dogmatics? The Confession which our Evangelical Lutheran Church set up before the whole of Christendom with the declaration: This is our faith; on this we will live, for this we will suffer and die? And you say: Yes, Fathers! Fathers! are not the Confessions also from the Fathers? No, that is not the confession of these Fathers alone; they were only slight instruments to express what was written with living, fiery script in the hearts of all true Lutherans. They wrote down with ink what the Lutherans, in holy, divine joyfulness of faith, had often confessed with the shedding of their blood. You really ought to retract that remark, Pastor Muus. If it is to hold in our Synodical Conference that the Confessions are also nothing other than the dogmaticians, then it is in fact a mockery and scorn when we say in our constitution: We base ourselves on the Confession. If we let that pass, everyone will say: As one regards good old books with a certain piety, so and no differently do you regard the Symbols. Is that loyalty to the Confession? And afterwards you said, to my astonishment, when we were speaking of the causes of election: Yes, even the works are a cause that moves God to appoint a man to heaven or to hell. Where will you end up! Such expressions, which you yourself will reject if you consider them calmly, are proof of where the opposition has already driven you. You will not stop there. In order to combat and defeat us Old Lutherans, you will be compelled more and more to abandon the doctrine of grace and to oppose the teaching that man can do nothing at all, that everything is eternal mercy. Otherwise