# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1862_S70
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

protection than that one puts out the one who is wicked. Once the children of unbelief have been excluded, the government again has nothing to do with them as unbelievers, for worldly government has no jurisdiction whatever over the kingdom of Christ, over the heart, over faith or unbelief. But if the unbelievers do evil deeds, then a Christian government punishes such deeds with the sword — not as a member of its own estate within the church, but as an estate ordained by God within the world. For the Christian character of a believing government consists in this: that it does what belongs to its calling, within the order given it by God, so that as a worldly government it punishes evil in the world, maintains order and peace in the world, and thereby protects the church so that it may build itself up independently. But it does not consist in the government's outwardly punishing and compelling misers and people who, say, do not respect false bans, and thereby lending worldly force and worldly assistance to the worldly conduct of unspiritual servants of the church. That would mean making the Christian government unchristian, and making it a servant of ungodly, antichristian designs. God, of his grace, preserve us from such doctrines of Satan!

On the cohesion of a synod, Grabau expresses himself further on page 13, where he takes up the matter with his "friends in Prussia." He says he restrained himself for a long time, and only on November 1 bore testimony against Diedrich. The cohesion of a synod — that is, what binds the members of a synod to one another — Grabau traces back to "the cohesion of Christians and Christian congregations." And the bond that holds these together, he says, is to be not "free love," but "God's holy calling." He teaches: "According to the conviction of us all, the church of the Lord Jesus is, by its nature and kind, a divine synthesis on earth, that is, a divine joining together and katartismos [equipping] of the saints. Ephesians 4:12. It is in faith in this public, divine joining-together that we have come to one another and belong to one another — not first through so-called free love and free agreement. Whoever wishes to found the belonging-together of Christians on this, and no longer on the one and the same divine calling in Christ Jesus, founds it instead on something human and changeable. We found our membership and our cohesion only on the divine calling to Christ, by which we are truly called by God to be one body and one spirit. — The Son of God speaks not merely of an inward belonging-together, but of a public, churchly belonging-together, by which the world is to recognize and believe that the Father has sent him. John 17. He knows only of one flock, which belongs together under his voice, for which he lays down his life, which knows him — for he has called them together as one, with a heavenly call, in which they have life and full sufficiency... They are such as God has chosen and appointed to sonship toward himself through Jesus Christ. The body of Christ, and the fullness of his grace and truth." How many words, and