# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1896_S19
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1896. 19

How does Christ agree with Belial? Therefore come out from among them and be separate!" And here the clean and the unclean join together. That is sufficient to make it known that we are dealing here with an institution which is against God's Word, and our churchly conduct toward the lodge system is so governed by these verdicts of rejection of the divine Word upon this abomination that we would make ourselves guilty of unbiblical practice contrary to Scripture if we took toward these societies a different stand from what God's Word directs us, and if we stood otherwise toward them than God's Word prescribes. And we know indeed that also with regard to this matter in wide circles of the so-called Lutheran Church a very sad disregard of the divine norm is to be lamented.

Governed in God's Word is further also our practice of burial. That a person is buried may indeed be a civil matter, and as long as it is a civil matter, a Christian as a citizen may also take part in this civil proceeding, without thereby exercising either right or wrong church practice. But burial may also, through the attendant circumstances, and should among us Christians, through the manner and way in which this last honor is carried out, assume a churchly character, and so burial also enters into church life. Then it is a confession of the Church, of the congregation, through its pastor, if he goes along, through the members of the congregation, if they hold a funeral service, that they have been and still are in churchly fellowship with the departed, who is now to be committed to the earth, as with one who in the kingdom of God, in the Church Militant, was with them to his end and has now, as one of their own, entered into the Church Triumphant, whither they all hasten. That lies in the churchly burial, and God says in the eighth commandment: "You shall not bear false witness." It is a quite open, great, gross lie when a congregation and a pastor give a churchly burial to one who has not belonged to them, whom they could not acknowledge as a brother, of whom they may not assume that he has died in the faith; and just as little as a Christian or a congregation is to say any other lie or to live in other lies, is it to make itself guilty of this lie, that it gives out someone as something he was not in fact, treats someone as that which he can count as only by lying. Or else a congregation and its pastor say: The whole town knows that he was no Christian; nobody believes, if we go along, that we mean that he was a Lutheran Christian; everyone knows he was one of our opponents. Well, then God's Word says: "Take heed that you give no offense"; and it is a hideous offense which one gives to the brethren and to the enemies when one, with churchly honors, as in a churchly burial, brings a recognized godless person to the grave. For first of all the world says: