# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1862_S69
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Critique of the Report of the Seventh Synod of the [Church] Emigrated from Prussia, etc. 69

civil order, with protection over the pious and with justice against blasphemers and misers." What does it mean that the government rules with the sword? Evidently nothing other than by outward force, outward compulsion, outward punishment — but not through conviction, through the inward persuasion of the conscience. Now how is a Christian government to set about, for instance, bringing misers to pay their monthly contributions to the cent-fund? It may not employ outward force, for that would mean using the sword or the cudgel. It may use only the Word, for there is absolutely no other weapon in the church of God; so it would have to preach — but in doing so it ceases to be a worldly government, whose office it is "to use the sword," and reaches over into the preaching office. Here there is an insoluble conflict: the Christian government is supposed "to carry out" [what is resolved]; if it carries this out in a Christian, or rather churchly, manner, it thereby ceases to be what it is, and commits sin, because it reaches into an office not its own. If it carries it out in a worldly manner, then it again does grave wrong, for the sword does not belong in the church. But suppose even that Grabau could bring in a government to compel a miser to pay his cent regularly, or to make a blasphemer respect the pronounced ban, because the one feared being distrained upon continued resistance and the other feared being put in the stocks — what would the church of God have gained by that? How would the congregations have been improved? Would the miser thereby have become a Christian, and the blasphemer a God-fearing man? Would the Christians have any reason to rejoice in such lessons? Would the congregations be strengthened by this recourse to the police, in love and esteem for the holy preaching office? Ah, how sad it is, how confusing to the conscience, how destructive to the congregations, when the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of this world are mixed together by power-hungry spirits! But where the right knowledge of the church is lacking, such a wild disorder must always arise, even if at first only in concept (for the government here does not so easily let itself be misused by the clergy). And it becomes all the more dangerous the more refined a sophistry gives the appearance of truth to an inner lie. What a sweet-sounding phrase it is when it is said: "the Christian government protects the church against the works and children of unbelief as a member of its own estate within it, not as a worldly ruler over it" — and what deception lies behind it once it comes to actual practice! For if the children of unbelief are still outward members of the church, then the Christian government cannot ban them as a "member of its own estate," that is, as a worldly government — for what has worldly government to do with excommunication? A mayor or a police captain counts for no more in the church than a cowherd or a servant, for the Lord says, "you are all brothers," and all of them alike are to rebuke a child of unbelief, and if he will not listen, to regard him as a tax collector. In the church there is to be no other