# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1890_S10
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

10 Proceedings of the thirteenth convention

e.g.: "Whether the government be evil or good, we are to be subject to it, so long as it commands only concerning bodily things" (E. A. 20, 299). Hesshusius writes: "And it is very well said by Aristotle: magistratus est custos legis [the magistrate is the guardian of the law]; government is a protectress of the law. But government does not carry out the whole law, but only a small piece of it, namely as much as concerns outward discipline and obedience, which worldly rule can bring about." (On the Office and Authority to Call Pastors, Leipzig 1854, p. 12.)

Lutheran doctrine, then, is that the office of government extends only over purely external and worldly things.

Nowadays, to be sure, the office of government is extended much further, although one now tends to speak less of government than of the state. But "state" is an abstract concept; in Scripture we read nothing of the state, only of government. Only for a couple of hundred years has the theory of the state arisen, and the concept of the state is stretched ever further and its influence sought to be extended ever more. Then it is to provide not only, as government does according to Scripture, for external order, for punishment of the wicked and protection of the pious, but also for art and science, for education, for trade and commerce and who knows what else, indeed also for church matters. The philosopher Hegel teaches, after all, that in the end the church must be absorbed into the state. By such theories both, church and state, are completely mixed together, whereas our Confessions have always insisted from the start that these two realms be completely separated from one another. Where this separation is not clean, it results in great harm to the church and to the state.

What has just been demonstrated as the teaching of Scripture and of the Lutheran Confession, namely that the office of government extends only to temporal goods, not over spiritual matters, and that church and "state" must be cleanly separated and neither interfere in the other's office, that is also good old American conviction. For although the Declaration of Independence states various doctrines as basic principles needing no proof, which can in no way be reconciled either with the biblical doctrine of original sin or with the doctrine of the relation of subjects to government, yet according to the Constitution of the United States, as well as the constitutions of many individual states, it has been held as settled that the state is not to meddle in church matters. We ought to acknowledge with joy and thanks to God that we live in a country in which it has always been insisted that the boundary between church and state be drawn sharply.

An objection was raised: but are there not also passages of Scripture in which the worldly government is granted authority over the church in spiritual matters? Does not God's Word call princes "nursing fathers of the