# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1862_S71
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Critique of the Report of the Seventh Synod of the [Church] Emigrated from Prussia, etc. 71

how little clarity and truth! So, then, what joins Christians together into a congregation, a church, the body of Christ, is supposed to be the divine calling, but not "free love." That is, in fact, such profound-sounding nonsense that it is as if one wanted to say that the tree bears apples, and the ground of that is the root of the tree, but not the blossoms. The matter is really so simple that it truly takes Buffalonian artifice to make it difficult, confused, and twisted. For the divine calling kindles faith, which unites Christians with Christ; faith proves itself in love, and this true, unforced, and therefore all the firmer, free, willing love binds the brothers to one another, joins them together indissolubly. As firmly as faith binds Christians to Christ, so firmly does love bind Christians to one another; as divine as faith is, just as divine is love, for both come from the one divine calling. — When Grabau says that whoever founds the belonging-together of Christians on love founds it on something human and changeable, that is simply one more of the usual Grabauian distortions, in that he puts words into Tiedrich's mouth, [claiming] that the latter meant by "free love" the human self-will of the old Adam. — Does Grabau perhaps think he can hold his synod together better by insisting on the divine calling and looking askance at free love? Does he think it is a sin to be disobedient to the divine calling, but a lesser sin to act against love, to separate oneself from a synod out of selfishness and stubbornness, and to secede? But that is how it goes when one lacks the right concept, the right knowledge of the church: then all handling and building upon it is bungling. Then one becomes afraid of "free love" and imagines it to be too free, too powerless a thing, that one cannot govern "the heads" with it; but dark, confused, yet religious-sounding phrases will, it is thought, hold minds in fear and obedience more readily.

Grabau's false doctrine of the church is well enough known, yet it may not be amiss to lay bare its inner contradiction once more on this occasion. According to Grabau, the church is, "by its nature and kind," "a public divine joining-together," "a public churchly belonging-together." Those thus publicly joined together are those "whom God has chosen and appointed to sonship"; they are "the body of Christ and the fullness of his grace and truth." The congregation at Buffalo is a public divine joining-together; in this public congregation there are, as in all congregations, hypocrites. Accordingly these hypocrites too are "chosen," "the body of Christ, the fullness of his grace and truth," for they are indeed publicly joined together with the congregation, publicly and churchly belong together, and are perhaps even apparently the most pious and active members. Furthermore: among Catholics, Methodists, etc. there are without doubt also true children of God; yet these are not chosen, not members of the body of Christ, do not belong to the church, for they belong to no true