# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1916_S48
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

48 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth convention

push themselves forward in the political struggle, even if they want to do so as citizens. People often do not distinguish between the pastor and the citizen, and so we easily run the danger of giving at least an evil appearance. And that too we should avoid. To be sure, the Church may and should also uncover the dangers that threaten the state from the side of the papacy; it can and should set forth the moral and social harms which the papacy brings with it for our country and its public welfare, especially the dangers for civil and religious liberty. Luther did so again and again. In his writings he warned not only Christians against the human ordinances and the work-righteousness of the Pope, but also pointed his Germans, for example in his *Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation*, to the social harms, to the avarice of the papacy, to its encroachments on the rights of princes and nations, and showed that the Pope can show no right, neither divine nor human, for it. — The Church can and should further admonish her members, the Christians, as in other matters so also in this matter to fulfil faithfully and conscientiously their duty toward their country, with the lawful means at their disposal, to protect their country against this evil enemy; but how they do this, what means and methods they apply, on that the Church has nothing to determine. It can and may make no prescriptions and is not at all to concern itself with what parties, what men its members vote for at the elections, and the like. We act here just as we otherwise admonish Christians to do their duty faithfully and diligently, conscientiously, in their worldly calling, as farmers, as shoemakers and tailors, as physicians and lawyers, and whatever they may be, without our interfering in particular in these various occupations and their exercise. But, as said, great caution is needed here, that we not bring the Church into politics, otherwise we should only endanger our struggle against the papacy.

The right, spiritual struggle against the Pope we can wage only through the Gospel. To free the consciences of the people from the Pope and his human ordinances and from his shameful work-righteousness and his trust in human merit, external laws do not help, nor the instruments of power of the state, nor the arguments of human reason, human wisdom and science and art, and whatever else one may bring up of human means; that God alone can do, and he will do it, as he has let us be told through his apostle, "by the spirit of his mouth," through the Gospel. This is shown especially also by the history of the God-blessed Reformation. How did the Reformation come about, which has done the Pope such harm as no other event in world history? God himself intervened here. Luther has