# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1861_S199
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

199

The State's Decision in Churchly Matters.

It has hitherto been among the favorite thoughts of this synod that the
Church should be articulated according to the three estates, the teaching,
the nourishing, and the defending estate, so that in the household estate it
might have a power which would "preserve for the Word of God its validity and
obedience in life," and in the estate of the magistracy "the protecting
authority for God's Word and the just ordinances of the Church," or so that
the latter might "protect doctrine and a godly life, and with its wisdom and
divine authority give to what the Church says support and emphasis among
men." So, namely, the Senior of the Ministerium expressed himself in his
address at the opening of the 5th synodical assembly in 1856. (See Lehre und
Wehre, vol. 2, p. 293.) Whether the Buffalo Synod still cherishes such a hope
of a marriage of the Church with the State seems to us very doubtful. After a
congregation of its body in Johannisburg, Niagara Co., N. Y., had for the
greatest part, with its trustees, seceded from it in the year 1859, it called
upon the arm of the magisterial estate, that the same might at least help it
to retain the church property of this congregation. But although it has
already tried through several instances to obtain this help, it has not
succeeded to this day. What impression this has made upon it, Mr. Pastor
Grabau lets us see in a little tract which he has recently published and
which bears the following title: "A Look into the Public Suit against the
Missourian Faction at Johannisburg. Together with Remarks on Its Result
Hitherto. For North America and Germany. Issued by J. A. A. Grabau, Senior
of the Ministerium of the Lutheran Synod of Buffalo. Buffalo, 1861. Printed
by F. Reinecke." (35 pages in octavo.) The little tract is written in an
evidently most irritated frame of mind against the judges concerned, since
these appear not to have regarded the seceders as a "Missourian faction," nor
the few who remained as the sole rightful "confessional congregation." The
whole is an attempt at a purely juridical counter-demonstration against the
judicial decision that went against the Buffalo Synod. How indignant the
Senior is about it is expressed, among other things, in the following words:
"But if the opinion of that Court, or of Mr. Hoyt" (one of the judges), "is
this, that the congregation so incorporated has not, and cannot have, any
confessional character before the law of the land, then incorporation as a
church incorporation is the greatest nonsense, since that would be no
religious incorporation at all; and at the same time the greatest tyranny,
because it would pronounce the civil death sentence upon all religious
confessions! But what church, whose faith and conscience rests and lives in
its public confession, and which desires to live protected within the borders
of a state, could put up with such a despotic power on the part of the state,
that through incorporation its confessional character" (so far as its
relation to the