# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1890_S8
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

8 Proceedings of the thirteenth convention

Antitheses:

1. Of the Anarchists. The anarchists want no government at all. Their chief teacher, Proudhon, who also coined the saying "Property is theft," maintains that the true form of the state is anarchy. By this he does not, to be sure, understand complete disorder, but still the absence of a lawful sovereign, whether king, president or legislative assembly; likewise he wants no laws. Everyone is to be able to do and leave undone what he wants. But that is a condition that results in a war of all against all, in which the weaker must succumb.

Similar already were the Anabaptists (*Wiedertäufer*), at the time of the Reformation, who maintained that government is not a holy estate, indeed, an estate in which no New Testament Christian could live with a good conscience.

2. Of the Romanists. So Berthold of Chiemsee: "The origin of government is not a divine one, but, on account of all kinds of error and wickedness that arose among men, God has permitted that men among themselves should set up kings and other rulers." Plitt, Augsburg Confession, II, p. 401.

Augustine of Ancona: "The Pope has all royal and imperial power in the whole world."

Berthold of Chiemsee: "Then God ordained that worldly realms arisen through the sin of men, outside Christendom, are not to be held as God's ordinance, but as tyranny. If the government refuses to lend the church its strong arm, then the church can declare it to be no government, which one can and must resist." Germany has experienced enough of this, and it is not the least merit of Luther that he set the right doctrine of government, which had been lost up to his time, back on the lampstand.

3. Of the Rationalistic Teachers of Constitutional Law. To these belong all modern teachers of the state. They regard the state and government as a natural product and abstract entirely from God's Word and will.

God, however, has not prescribed any particular form of government. It is true that in 1 Tim. 2:2 and 1 Pet. 2:13 government is called βασιλεύς, king, but only as a factual presupposition. When the Israelites demanded a king after the manner of the heathen, 1 Sam. 8:6 ff., God did not directly will that they should have a king, but merely permitted it. It is therefore not the case, as many in Germany rave, that the monarchical form of government is the one actually willed by God.

Prov. 30:24: "Four things are little on the earth, and wiser than the wise," etc. Prov. 11:14.