# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1859_S335
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Buffalonians Once More on Our Catechism. 335

that C. Dietrich, after all, has this Bible passage nowhere among his dogmatic proof-texts, since with the help of this word — already so often tortured by the Missourians — 'All things are yours!', which Mr. Walther directly smuggles into his catechism at this point of doctrine, he wishes to impute to the old Dietrich an Anabaptist opinion." Since now, as has been shown above, Dietrich really does have that passage "among his dogmatic proof-texts," and indeed in exactly the same connection and for the same proof as our catechism, everyone can see that Mr. H., in wishing to make us suspected of Anabaptist falsifications of Scripture, has thereby made the old Dietrich, our predecessor, into an Anabaptist and falsifier of Scripture! Poor man! Let us hope that experience will teach him better, seeing that with his criticizing of doctrine he falls from one manifest folly into another, and that he will now begin, shamefacedly, to examine himself and first to study the Lutheran doctrine and literature for himself.

Besides these accusations (which in any case have their chief ground in ignorance of the doctrine and in zeal without understanding), Mr. H. unfortunately also utters several manifest, knowing untruths; for example, that the so-called Missourians "gladly admit to their Lord's Supper all those who have been banned by the Buffalo ministerium as public and impenitent sinners" — that "the Missourians wished, by means of 1 Cor. 3:26–23, to justify, in the case of every sect, that the people alone should set up a teacher for themselves" — that the Missourians taught "faith and the Holy Spirit are the Church" — that the editor of the Lutheraner says "the Roman papal church may rightly be called Christian, that is, catholic," and so forth. To attempt to refute such knowing untruths does not occur to us. We note them merely to the shame of their author.

A further untruth is it when Mr. Hochstetter imputes to the old Dietrich the Buffalonian doctrine that the ban should be carried out by the preachers alone, without the congregation. Mr. H. writes, namely: "It is well known enough that the Missourians call a ban a false and unjust ban when it is pronounced not upon the resolution of a congregational assembly, but upon the decision of the ministerium (that is, as Dietrich says, of the lawful successors of the apostles)." What a godless and abominable doctrine is hereby being defended cannot be expressed in words. By this one tyrannical, papistic doctrine, the Buffalonians publicly and solemnly exclude themselves from the Lutheran Church and load upon themselves a fearful guilt, which — God grant it — will soon, soon become too heavy for their souls. Consider only that here they teach not merely, as all Lutherans do, that the execution of the ban belongs to the pastors, but rather that the decision [belongs to them] without a congregational resolution! What Luther has judged of such banning is well known; what Conr. Dietrich has taught on this point — to whom Mr. H. presumes to appeal for his shameful doctrine — we have already communicated in detail in the 4th number of the "Lutheraner."