# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1862_S78
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

78    Critique of the Report of the Seventh Synod of the Emigrants from Prussia, etc.

"for one must not believe men in God's affairs." A Christian congregation shall itself help to examine, test, and judge. Every member of a congregation, even Greta and Hans, must be "certain" that one about to be banned has earned the ban. For if he is not certain of this and yet holds a brother to be under the ban, he commits shameful sin; for on the one hand he acts in doubt, not knowing whether the verdict, the ban of his superiors, is right and his own conduct pleasing to God or not; on the other hand, it is a wholly dreadful lovelessness to hold and shun someone as a publican and a heathen who may possibly have been unjustly banned. There can therefore be no more godless tyranny than to require of even a single member of a congregation that he hold a brother to be a hardened sinner before he has, out of his own conviction, co-judged and co-ruled that the brother, according to the Word of God, has indeed earned the ban. A Christian congregation, in which conscientious men and not wretched menials sit, is therefore obliged, in divine matters, in matters of the ban, to believe no man, be he official, bishop, senior, church council, synod, or whatever else it may be called, and to "accept" no ban unless it has itself helped to examine the matter and has said "yes!" to the judgment. For a Christian congregation, with all its members, with Hans and Greta, is "co-judge and co-mistress," and not merely other men's bailiff. If one tries to force Hans, he should say: Oh yes, indeed, welcome to you, dear senior or synod, etc. — whomever I am to hold as banned, him will I first myself have recognized and judged as banned; otherwise let no devil force me to it, for he might be a child of God, and then I would fall into the hands of him who can destroy body and soul in hell. Before the Lord I am afraid, but before you shameful tyrants I am not afraid at all!

Of the "scruples of conscience" of the individual members of the congregation, Grabau now wants to hear nothing at all. He says: "As for the scruples of conscience of the congregation, of which it is said here that they shall be heard, it is strange to want to hear these in a so-called congregational assembly; for what has the admonishing assembly of Christians in the third stage [tertio gradu] to do with scruples of conscience, since already long before this all the matter — including the sinner's sin — must stand fast in the mouth of two or three witnesses? There the sinner's heart and conscience have already shown themselves to be erring and sinful! What, then, are the scruples of conscience of those admonishing supposed to be at the third stage?" We must first ask in reply: When, then, is a congregation to bring forward whatever scruples of conscience it may have, if not at the third stage? For at the first and second stages the matter does not yet come before the congregation at all; only at the third does it say: "tell it to the congregation." Does Grabau perhaps wish to hear the scruples of conscience at the first and second stages? No, not at all! When, then? Never at all! The congregation's scruples of conscience are to have no influence whatsoever on the imposition of a ban. To be sure, he says, there is a "way"