# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1906_S32
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

32 Proceedings of the twenty-first convention

and practice is recognized than what God's Word prescribes. Unionism has eaten through everything in our time, and so there are many Christians who regard it as a self-evident demand of love that in the Church one also lets those go quite unmolested who deviate in doctrine. No, it is not so. We presuppose unity in doctrine and practice, and since we are so united in doctrine and practice, we remind ourselves that we must not disturb this unity by breaking the peace. Contentiousness, zeal, fanaticism have at all times played a terrible role in the Church. Already in the time of the Apostles this showed itself in various places. Paul preached in Antioch and Pisidia first to the Jews; they listened to him quite gladly and invited the Apostle to further preaching. But when the Apostle also preached to the Gentiles, the situation changed all at once. The Jews were filled with wrath and contradicted, Acts 13. They were ruled by the mind: We as Jews are elected and have the kingdom of God, but the Gentiles are not to come in. Through this envy, which was rooted in pride, they were brought to contradict the word which they had already heard and accepted, indeed to blaspheme the word which had earlier appeared to them as the power of God unto salvation. It is dreadful how in the Christian Church from the beginning envy and pride have always sought to destroy everything. We are naturally cut from quite the same wood; each of us is a born imperialist and wants to rule over the others. As surely as each of us wants first of all selfishly to look to his own, so surely there is also in us pride and the striving to rule over others, and unless we by God's grace keep this down, we shall continually fall into strife with one another and in this way endanger the greatest of all goods that there is here on earth among men, the unity in the Spirit.

That Luther also understands the passage in Ephesians just as we have now explained it is shown by the following sayings:

"It is clear and evident enough from experience what harm and ruin the offense of division and discord of doctrine brings into the Church. For besides the fact that many people are led astray and the crowd at once falls in when it hears something new from haughty, bold spirits, put forward with great show and fine words, it follows also from this that many of the weak and such well-meaning people fall into doubt, not knowing with which they should stay, from which it then further comes about that the doctrine is despised and blasphemed by many, who seek occasion to contradict it; likewise, that many become quite godless and Epicurean and count all religion and what is said of God's Word as nothing at all; likewise, that even those who are called Christians become embittered against one another in such wrangling, bite and devour themselves with hatred, envy and other vices, whereby both love grows cold and faith