# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1908_S27
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1908. 27

kept in the camp of the erring by appealing to "love." It is unloving, they say, to condemn all deviating doctrine, and love is after all the highest of all commandments. So it happens as it is written in Rom. 16:18: "By good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple." The right doctrine they slander, and to the false doctrine they seek to give the appearance of agreement with Scripture. As means to this must serve: concealment by human explanation, citation of passages of Scripture that do not deal with the matter, and the like.

How are we to behave toward those who are in the erring camp and whose Christianity we nevertheless do not dare to deny? We have to testify to them that they have separated themselves from fellowship among brethren in the faith. To proclaim and hold to false doctrine is to make division in the Church. And whoever holds to false teachers takes part in the division and separates himself from the fellowship among brethren in the faith ordained by God. It is, to be sure, quite commonly brought as a reproach against the orthodox that they cause division in the Church because they will not have fellowship with erring churches. But the evildoers who sever church fellowship are those who teach otherwise than the Word of God and who hold to those who teach otherwise. Therefore the fact that dear children of God are found in the erring communions should not change our judgment and conduct toward erring congregations. Not we are to go over to them, but they are to come over to us. That is God's will and order. In order that Christians may recognize God's will and order and keep to it, we persist in our testimony against all false doctrine and the division caused by it. In no case may we go over to false-believing communions, not even under the pretext that we want to establish contact only with the children of God in the false camp. If we were to fall in with them, we would thereby by the deed recognize the false-believing communion as having equal rights with the orthodox one.

In our own time especially, people want to introduce "parity" into the Christian Church, that is, orthodoxy is not to be alone entitled; it is to be a legal condition in the Christian Church that the confessors and the deniers of the doctrine of Scripture recognize one another as having equal rights in the Christian Church. Over in Germany associations have been formed whose avowed purpose is to secure for the representatives of so-called liberal theology equality of rights in the state churches. De facto the false teachers already have almost generally equal rights; but they want to have equal rights also de jure. And so-called positive theologians, who still want to hold to the fundamental truths of Christianity, have declared themselves ready to enter into this pact. (So recently Seeberg in Berlin.) That is an unscriptural and impossible position. The