# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1862_S79
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Critique of the Report of the Seventh Synod of the Emigrants from Prussia, etc.    79

to settle the scruples. "Whoever has scruples, let him turn to his preacher and pastor." But, he adds: "What is the power of such scruples?" Answer: "I know of none." So from the outset they are told that their scruples are wholly useless. The brother is banned, and they must hold him as banned, whatever their conscience may say.

We must further note that it is indeed true, "that the sin of the sinner must stand fast in the mouth of two or three witnesses." But apart from many other points that can give a conscientious man scruples in carrying out a ban, the matter at issue in the so unhappily torn congregations at Johannesburg, etc., was above all this: whether the sin for whose sake so great a banning, deposing, etc., took place, was sin at all or not. The acceptance of a cent-fund is a matter of church order, and only he can declare the rejection of it to be sin who places obedience in matters indifferent into the fourth commandment, and thereby first makes sin where God has set none.

We certainly do Grabau no wrong when we say that he has no understanding at all of the true sense of Christ's ordinance regarding the execution of a ban, Matt. 18. He says: "I find in God's Word only this, that the man's sin has already become manifest in the first two stages, and that if he immediately adds new sins, it becomes still more manifest; and that it is for this very reason that the matter proceeds with him to the third stage." But of this the Word of God and the Lord Jesus, in our passage, say not a syllable — that is something the great church-court-master Grabau hatches purely out of his own head. Christ says: if your brother sins, rebuke him; if he does not hear you, take two or three more with you; if he does not hear these, tell it to the congregation; if he does not hear that, hold him as a heathen. There it is always the one sin, unacknowledged and unrepented, that is at last to come before the congregation as the highest court. An impenitent sinner is, for this very reason, finally to be reported to the congregation — first, so that it too may admonish him, and he "hears," and is "rebuked by many," not merely one brother, and then two or three, but at last also many brethren. Then, so that the congregation, if he does not hear it, can and shall hold him as a publican and a heathen. For not only one or another member of the congregation — say, the church council — but all and every member, is bound to put away from itself and to shun such an impenitent sinner who "does not hear the congregation." But no one is to hold even a manifest sinner as thoroughly impenitent, and therefore as a "publican and heathen," until he has also refused the third stage of admonition. Whoever holds a sinner to be a publican and heathen sooner than that is a thoroughly loveless, unjust man who, like an evildoer, overthrows the order that God has established. Therefore a congregation neither can nor may hold anyone, before the third