# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1930_S37
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1930. 37

which he received of us. For ye yourselves know how ye ought to follow us. . . . And if any man obey not our word, note that man by an epistle, and have no company with him, that he may be ashamed." 1 Tim. 4:7: "But refuse profane and old wives' fables." 1 Tim. 6:3-5: "If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness; he is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings, perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself." Cf. v. 20. 2 Tim. 3:5: "Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away." Titus 3:10: "A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject."

These various admonitions and warnings were also at all times observed by the people of God and put into practice. To cite just one example, we find that Paul, who in Corinth had at first, according to his custom, preached the Gospel in the synagogue of the Jews, departed from there in the face of the continual contradiction of the Jews and went into the house of a man named Justus, who was God-fearing, Acts 18:7. He thus carried out a separation here, as happened again and again throughout the whole apostolic period, until at last the special time of grace of the people of the Jews as such came to an end and God's visitation laid waste the land of their fathers. — A quite similar separation took place in the age of the Reformation. The Reformation did not at all intend a new creation, the founding of a new church, but the Lutheran Church of the pure Word and Confession is the old apostolic Church, as it has been cleansed by Martin Luther from the filth and dross of the false doctrines of the Middle Ages. From another point of view, however, the significance of the Reformation lies in the fact that it was also a going out from a false fellowship, especially on the side of church law. Meusel puts it thus: "Luther wants to reform the existing church, but it proves itself irreformable and therefore for its part excludes from itself those who wish to reform. The Reformation is separation just as much in the passive as in the active. When the reformers are separated, they now for their part also separate themselves from the *vetustas erroris* [antiquity of error] to the *vetustas evangelii* [antiquity of the Gospel], and in leaving the existing, corrupted church they yet do not wish to form a new one, that is, no sect, but they wish to remain with the true, old Church of the prophets and apostles." — Quite the same holds also of the orthodox Lutheran free churches of Germany, especially the Saxon. "Those Lutherans for their part have always denied that they had separated themselves at all; they had rather remained with the old Lutheran Church, while the territorial church, through the introduction of the Union, had lost its former character and had become a new church, no longer Lutheran" (Meusel). This judgment is without doubt right, because it rests on Scripture ground and therefore still has full validity today under similar circumstances.

This leads us now to the other side, namely to the question of real separatism, as defined above. Here we find that Scripture speaks in the sharpest terms of separatists and schismatics. Rom. 16:17: "which cause divisions and