# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1898_S10
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

10 Proceedings of the seventeenth convention

perform; for here it is not a matter of a spiritual act." Even of a holy act, a person of erroneous belief can be a witness; but to enter into this act, to pray and confess as an orthodox believer with orthodox believers, he cannot. To be sure, Lutherans who have to choose baptismal sponsors should be told this: "Do take people in whom you really have sponsors as well, who are at once sponsors and witnesses, who can testify to the child, when it grows up: You were baptized in the name of the triune God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, I was there, and who at the same time accompany the child from its early years into later age with their prayers, keep a watchful eye on it, give it a word of admonition at the right time, and finally, if need be, also take care for its instruction in the Christian doctrine, as they have undertaken to do." Where this has not happened, however, but an otherwise respectable man has been asked to be a baptismal witness, one should also say honestly: This man I accept as a witness, not as a sponsor; he too should not consider himself obligated to have the child instructed in the right Christian faith, in the Lutheran doctrine; he should know that for his part he is not taking on this duty. If he later comes to better knowledge and wants to do it, he is still free to do so, but we do not expect it of him. A person who leads a scandalous life, who stands in openly known hostility to the congregation, through whose admission offense would certainly be given among the congregation's members and all who would learn of it, even among unbelievers, would also have to be turned away from the witnessing. A drunkard, a person who has been declared under the ban by the congregation, a person who has otherwise in some way made his name stink before the world and before Christendom and goes on in impenitence, such a one, as a horror, one should not inflict upon a child as a witness, nor expect of a congregation or a pastor that he be one by whom this holy act is to be attested.

Our old fathers from the century of the Reformation spoke out in their church orders precisely about the office of baptismal sponsor and baptismal witness. Thus it says in the Brandenburg-Nuremberg Order: "The godparents should be retained on account of the Anabaptists, who now pretend that they do not know whether they are baptized or not, and because the godparents, above all, give testimony alongside other people, and in the mouth of two or three witnesses every matter shall be established. Also so that someone may answer for the child, and, should its parents be taken from it too early by death, they may remind the children of what was promised on their behalf in baptism, and keep a diligent watch so that they live up to it and learn God's commandment, faith and prayer."

Here the significance of the godparent's office is also put in first place, whereby the godparents are to be witnesses of a rightly performed baptism.