# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1864_S82
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

82   Some Remarks on the Doctrine of the Supreme Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Prussia, etc.

delight and love, and follows from it necessarily. (Hence the warning: "The same must also be done concerning the article of Christian liberty, which the Holy Spirit, through the mouth of the holy apostle, has so earnestly commanded his church to preserve, as has just been heard. For as soon as that liberty is weakened, and human commandments are forced upon the church by compulsion as necessary, as though the omission of them were wrong and sin, the way to idolatry is already prepared, whereby afterward human commandments are heaped up and, as a form of worship, are not only made equal to the commandments of God but even set above them." fol. 317a. Cf. Augsburg Confession, fol. 19a, at the end. To diminish the authority of a church that makes law and sin for a conscience is not offensive [Thesis 55], but Christian; it cannot happen at all to a rightly ordered church — only where the dark spirit of Antichrist seeks further room for itself.)

Why, indeed, does one resist so the deriving of the observance of positive church laws from free love — which one explains away as merely the "preference of isolated sovereign individuals" — and put in its place the "obligatory obedience"! (Proceedings, p. 240–243.) And what suspicious fears one entertains of the "swarms of nomads and Rousseauian revolutionaries" supposedly arising from this! Against this Luther writes (Church Postil, on the epistle for Advent IV) concerning all outward statutes, "that one should keep them out of love and freedom, for the sake of others among whom one lives, so that one accommodates and conforms oneself to them — — that nothing is necessary for a Christian except faith and love alone, everything else being left free to love — for to keep such things out of love and freedom does no harm; but to keep them out of compulsion and obedience is damnable. This is to be understood also of the ceremonies, the singing, the prayers, and all other church ordinances — — but if one insists that it absolutely must be so, then one should at once desist and act against it, in order to preserve the freedom of faith." God has given no church the power to establish new laws to which one is bound in obedience; even the holy apostles themselves never presumed to do such a thing, Matthew 28:20, cf. Deuteronomy 4:2; it would have been an establishment of idol-worship, upon which the anathema has been pronounced.

To avoid the dangers that easily arise for faith from mere proximity to the errant paths just touched upon, it will always be more advisable for a Christian fellowship to surround itself with as few ordinances as can be done without detriment (which, at the very least, cannot be said of the opposing church). We readily grant, however, that such a fellowship — even a synod representing several congregations — may mutually bind itself to the lawful observance of its resolutions, as in the Proceedings, p. 188, Luther's words are for that reason cited: "The Christian church has power to establish customs and manners which are to be kept," etc. But, to be sure, this can happen only, as is added immediately following,