# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1859_S117
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Difference in the Law between the Missouri Synod, etc. 117

...over God and His will stands the cleverness of the "prominent men,"
who dictate how things are to be conducted in the church and, out of
their own wisdom, invent what shall be useful and salutary for the
church. That is the true state of affairs, and we now wish to demonstrate
the facts that will confirm our judgment concerning the General Synod.
For mere assertions, in which the periodicals of the General Synod have
thus far indulged, are indeed very cheap, but also quite worthless. Does
the "Missionary," for example, really know that the judgments of the
Missouri Synod (for the judgments of its periodicals are the judgments of
the Synod itself — we are not such an uneven crowd in "faith," in
"speech," and in "opinion" as would nonetheless, to its own true mockery,
merely for the sake of outward ends, call itself a synod, a church) "are
wholly one-sided, indeed untrue"? Then let him show it. Or is that
perhaps also meant to be a piece of "brotherly love" — that out of
forbearance or courtesy or delicacy one omits the closer proof of one's
accusing assertions? If that is the case, then here too the differing
spirit of the two synods shows itself once again. We know well that it is
God's earnest will that we be patient, kind, and gentle toward one
another, that we go before one another in honor, that we let our
gentleness be known to all men. But we also know, to speak with Luther,
that one ought not fall headlong into the Word of God the way a peasant
falls into his boots, but rather have understanding, and apply the Word
where it belongs. The Lord Jesus is most loving, kind, mild, gentle,
patient; yet He rebukes Peter sharply and reproaches him: "Get thee
behind me, Satan"; He rebukes and curses the Pharisees: "Woe unto you,
scribes and Pharisees, ye generation of vipers, ye hypocrites, ye whited
sepulchers"; He makes a scourge of cords and drives all the wrongdoers
out of the Temple, pours out the moneychangers' coin, and overturns the
tables. One can, therefore, also be harsh, rebuke, and curse, and do
rightly in it — do a fine, good, Christian work, following in the
footsteps of Christ Jesus. The rule by which a Christian is to do the one
thing or the other should, I should think, be easy enough to find and
utterly simple in its application: the weak one bears with — is patient
and gentle with them — and it is unloving and sinful to deal with them
harshly and severely; the gainsayers one rebukes, and the more harshly
the more resolutely they contradict, and to apply this same gentleness
and forbearance toward them is likewise unloving and just as great a sin,
because the gainsayers are thereby only confirmed in their evil mind. Let
no one, then, wish to be more loving, more brotherly, gentler and more
patient than the LORD Jesus Himself; that is a wretched, miserable,
carnal love which — however much it may glitter — has not God but the
devil for its father, and which every honest Christian therefore holds in
loathing and abhorrence. But this is the curse that strikes the builders
of the Babylonian tower of Love and Union (even under a Lutheran name):
that they become confounded, and now, precisely in the name of
"brotherly love,"