# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1858_S352
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

352 Church and Contemporary Notices.

or orally, unless you should wish, through written confession, to withdraw yourself from the confessor's eye and spare yourself the blush of shame that one cannot always avoid.

It is well to note that the right confession is not a confession of states, but the one that confesses actual sins. Behind a confession of states any kind of pride can hide; it need not be so, but it can very easily be so, and is very often a confession of hypocrites and dissemblers. A true penitent will indeed also bring his sinful states into confession; but once these are known to the confessor, he confesses in every confession the new fruits and works of darkness which have arisen out of those states, and does so quite precisely, with names and circumstances (!), yet in such a way that other persons who have taken part in the sins are not needlessly drawn into the confession as well." So much for my dictation. Now if you ask me whether all the various kinds of private confession, as I have set them out in the dictation, are actually practiced here in this congregation, then, especially with regard to our institutions, I can and must answer nothing but yes. All possible kinds of confession occur; they are practiced without anxiety in the most varied ways, and I try to cultivate this variety as much as possible. For all that, you must not look at me with wide eyes as though I had gotten very far in my office. I have quite different goals before me, and I wish I could lead my congregation further than to the stage that is now needed in order to practice the various kinds of general and private confession. Here we hold the Sacrament every three weeks, with confession beforehand, besides on every high festival, and quite often private communions as well, to which whole gatherings sometimes attach themselves. So it can happen, and does happen often enough, that someone goes to the Lord's Table twenty times or more in the course of a year. In this way a life arises which is consumed in preparing for and partaking of the Holy Supper and knows no other alternation but preparation and partaking. Where this is the case, individual confession — though not absolution — loses its high value, since it constantly recurs; for what should a person really have to confess that is newly arisen every 10 or 14 days? Though one sins continually, and to such a degree that even our best works are imperfect, unclean, and corrupt, still an experienced Christian will not confess every new sin, because not every occasion taught above for confessing applies every time. If he is known to his pastor and can trust him, then it is not even clear why again and again merely a formula of confession would have to be spoken. Indeed it is conceivable, and will sometimes occur, that once or another time a Christian goes to the Supper even without absolution. Even though the Augsburg Confession sets forth the Lutheran church order that no one should go unexamined to the Lord's Table, this does not mean that the Reformers intended, by this purely human ordinance, to bind consciences; for what would a pastor gain, for instance, by examining a Christian of whom he already knows that he understands the whole counsel of God for salvation very well — in the end better than many a pastor knows it? One certainly cannot say that confession and absolution must be inseparably and indeed always bound to the Supper, especially since an absolution lies in the Sacrament of the Altar itself. For people of the kind described, the church order of the Augsburg Confession need not be binding in this case; with their pastor's permission they may use the Confiteor in the general service for their confession and go with the others to the Lord's Table. Indeed this very condition — that as a rule one does not need special confession — is a higher and more desirable one than that in which one must confess in some way on every day appointed for confession (!). Let us imagine a congregation that went to the Lord's Table every Sunday, and did so in all its members, who both would and could do it; that would just as surely presuppose the best possible condition as it would make the customary private confession of all and each impossible. The best condition, then, would be the one that would at least partly abolish what we must recognize as the highest attainable, yet in most congregations not even attainable at all. So I must take the best condition as my goal, but must regard the condition attained in Neuendettelsau — though it cannot be reached at all in most congregations — only as a way station. I must not settle into rest simply because I have attained what others have not attained. You might indeed reply to me by asking whether it can be justified before anything but a merely human church government, if I strive after a condition which, though probably never to be attained even among us, would, so far as it were attained, stand in the way of the ordinary Lutheran practice of confession as something hindering, because going far beyond it. But I must confess to you that such a question seems to me entirely useless. If only that life were first present which would be higher than the ample use of the confessional order presently existing among us, it would then win its own existence and course, and every truly Christian church government would then have to proceed according to the word: "Quench not the Spirit (!)."