# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1862_S81
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Critique of the Report of the Seventh Synod of the Emigrants from Prussia, etc.    81

taken toward the carrying out of a ban? Will the sinner's partisans, through the fact that one refuses to hear their scruples of conscience and pushes the ban through despite all their objection, now cling less to the sinner, hold him more earnestly as banned, and shun him? Will the sinner take fright at the consequences of his impenitence — that he is separated and shunned by all the members of the congregation, and that the final separation before the Last Judgment is thereby already prefigured for him — if the "majority" of the congregation, the more it thinks that he has been wronged, and the more embittered it becomes that no account has been taken of its scruples, only draws the closer to him? What can be the consequence of such an immature, senseless, unchristian manner of proceeding with the ban? Nothing else than deep division, bitter strife, the tearing-apart of congregations! Truly it is bad when many immature, erring, and insincere church elders and church members are in a congregation, or when "the majority" even consists of such people; but it is far worse when a senseless church ministerium exercises the ban in a congregation where no churchly sense and understanding yet prevails, and the congregation is thereby utterly torn apart. How little, indeed, has Grabau, that great ruler of the church, grasped of the heavenly wisdom of the true Regent of the Church, when He says, Matt. 9:16–17: "No one puts a patch of new cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away again from the garment, and the tear becomes worse. Neither does one put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are ruined. But new wine is put into new wineskins, so both are preserved together." —

Thesis 6: "That a false ban does not make the church false, but that it, where it can be proven, must be set aside, and that no one may be compelled to respect a false ban as a true one, nor to call the false ban just, either in words or in deed." — Grabau answers: "In this thesis there is this much truth: that a false ban does not yet make the church false, and that such a ban, when it is proven (not merely, as is said here, when it can be proven), must be set aside. — But it is false that no one may be compelled to respect a false ban as a true one, etc., if it can be proven false; for mere possibility is not enough in Christendom, but rather the actual, that is, orderly and public, demonstration of its erroneousness or falsity is properly required for that, that is, from God's Word and accordingly also according to the standing evangelical church order." — How very peevish the Herr Senior is over this thesis, and how utterly foolishly he answers it. He says that mere possibility is not enough in Christendom, that it is necessary that the false ban also be proven as such. But how in all the world is it to be proven, if it cannot be proven as such? Had the questioners said that the false ban, where it is proven,