# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1898_S34
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

34 Proceedings of the seventeenth convention

helps support or beautify a false-believing service by his organ playing or by his choral singing, and contributes to people coming the more gladly to where they now hear the false doctrine, he sins thereby, and indeed violates love toward God and the neighbor, and should be put under discipline for it by a Christian congregation.

The question was raised here: How does the principle "The congregation is the highest judge in its affairs" agree with the demand that the congregation must let itself be reproved by others? May the congregation, in order not to be reproved, appeal to the principle that it is the highest judge? Does this principle entitle it to refuse a visitation by the synodical officers?

Answer: The congregation is indeed the highest court in all its affairs, spiritual and secular. Nor is the distinction between the judgeship of the divine Word and that of the congregation necessary, at least. God's Word is the norm according to which the congregation is to judge, the law book according to which it is to pronounce justice. In this law all cases are already decided *in abstracto* [in the abstract], insofar as every case and every deed is reprehensible that does not agree with the law. But the application of the law to the individual case is properly the exercise of the judicial office, and of this it holds that, where a congregation has given judgment, a proper appeal to a higher instance on earth is not possible. If, then, an appeal is made from a congregation's decision to the synod, this must not be regarded as an appeal from a lower to a higher court, from the decision of a lower to the legally valid decision of a higher instance, but only as a way of obtaining and hearing the counsel of the brethren in this case. But if a congregation, where advice is to be given it, where a remonstrance is to be made to it, refers in refusing to the principle that the congregation is the highest court, it thereby does not assert but denies its dignity as a sister congregation. Visitors and other synodical officers are not judges but brotherly counselors, who see in the congregation which they are to counsel a sister congregation to which they owe love. —

Such an occupation, which is not wrong everywhere and in and of itself, but which as a rule becomes through added circumstances one through whose practice love of God or of the neighbor or both is unavoidably violated, is also that of an actor. One must not say: In the time of the Reformation plays were performed in schools and elsewhere, and therefore the theater cannot be condemned as a reprehensible thing by the children of the Reformation. For with the word "play" one really does not yet say at all whether the thing one has to do with is something morally unobjectionable and unassailable, or something morally offensive