# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1851 11 25_S54
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

54

"Since we have felt disquieted since your last appearance in the church with respect to the banning of several members, we find, after ample deliberation and in the tender feeling of Christian brotherly love, that you have not only committed partisan, grossly erroneous acts, running contrary to every Christian order, which induce us to call upon you in Christian love to show from God's holy Word that you could act thus against these souls without any ground and cause. We find just the opposite of what you laid to the charge of these cast-out ones, and it was precisely you who grievously erred in permitting a Unionist to set up reading services, etc. — which, because it was declared to him to be contrary to order, was bound to bring forth the exasperated hatred and to put you in a false light." —

Nowhere, however, has Pastor Winkler, in his counter-writings which are on record, represented this complaint as an invented one, plucked out of the air. On the contrary, he clearly refers to it, when in a letter of the 16th of March of last year it reads literally as follows:

"From two writings handed to me — one of the 6th of March and one of the 12th — it appears that they, seven in number, namely Fr. Stricker, etc., etc., appear against me as plaintiffs — not on account of doctrine and life, but, as they say, on account of 'gross errors' in the administration of church discipline. — Now it is commonly known that our time, as regards church discipline, lies wholly and altogether in evil case; that the present generation is in general undisciplined and wants to be so, and that therefore the setting up of Christian discipline is hindered on all sides. No wonder, then, if the proceeding of a single pastor in this respect is judged differently by different persons. The undersigned is conscious before God that in the exclusion of any member he has always proceeded according to his best knowledge and conscience. Each time he has set forth the grounds of such proceeding publicly, and even now, upon repeated examination of the matter, cannot recognize that wrong has been done to a single one of the excluded."

Accordingly it is certain from Pastor Winkler's own words what the true point of contention was, and even if he himself further below brings in private confession, yet nothing of it is heard in the complaint cited, not so much as a syllable. To be sure, Winkler now, after more than a year, explains this to mean that the people had been ashamed to bring it forward, but what does he gain thereby? From his own account everyone must recognize that the complaint related to the oft-mentioned cases of the ban, as he also in the answer cited expressly declared himself willing to have just this matter examined and decided by an honest, competent, confession-true church court. Although the complainants in their reply earnestly protested that they were by no means in the first place complaining against their pastor, but had only wished to make representations to him out of God's Word, yet, since they could not be set at rest concerning the bans that had occurred, no other way remained to them than to accept Winkler's proposal, to which end they then, without the writer of this having the least inkling or knowledge of it, turned to the President of our Synod with the request to send them a man who on their part should be a member of a committee by which, according to the constitution there, the matter was to be judged and settled. Winkler, to be sure, says in his remark on the letter of the 6th of March that according to 1 Tim. 5:19 properly no Christian church court could have heard these plaintiffs unless they brought forward Christian and unsuspected witnesses from the congregation, who were acknowledged by themselves. But if this remark is to have any sense and purpose here, it must unfortunately be this, to make the ignorant believe that we, in granting that request, had offended against 1 Tim. 5:19. But let each one judge for himself whether that is to be called receiving an unattested accusation against an elder, when the pastor and a numerous complaining part of a congregation, upon the former's motion and in accordance with their constitution, agree to call members of a committee to judge and decide the matter, and a Synod informed of all this according to the records sends, upon the urgent request of the one party, a man to the same, who is to serve them as a committee member. Truly, it will be hard for Pastor Winkler to deceive even a single simple person with such shallow sophistry. On the contrary, all honest persons will have to confess that the President of our Synod, in granting the above request, acted only in accordance with Christian love and divine order, not contrary to them, and that he, however, entrusted the undersigned with this matter without his knowledge and will, every one will naturally find, who considers that the same was at that time pastor in Frankenmuth, 90 miles north of Detroit, and thus among the older members of our Synodical body was Winkler's nearest neighbor!

(To be continued)

Second Report from Our Delegates in Germany.

The second private letter of one of our friends, dated Erlangen, the 11th of October, has just arrived; and since this refers in passing to an official report sent off earlier for the "Lutheraner," which, however, has not yet come to the hands of the interim editorship, it follows that it has either been lost or has somehow been detained on the way.

We can therefore communicate to our readers only by extracts from the letter before us what is of importance and interest in substance.

As to the outcome of their negotiations with Pastor Löhe and his friends, it had not yet been brought to a conclusion at the sending of the letter. Yet, as it ran, "many mutual scruples have fallen away, and Löhe has also now explained himself better on several important points." The cause of the interruption of their negotiations was a necessary conference which Pastor Löhe held with his friends, concerning their withdrawal from the Landeskirche, on the 9th of October at Schwabach, and at which our delegates were also present. For a rescript had come in from the Oberconsistorium in answer to their representation, "which acknowledged as justified the appeal of all strict Lutherans to the Lutheran Confession and promised that the Lutheran Church of Bavaria should be set in its right constitution." "It has therefore been resolved by Löhe and his friends, and indeed with our full and joyful assent, that they will remain in connection with the Landeskirche and wait for improvement, only that they will publicly and solemnly renounce all religion-mingling communion at the Lord's Supper that is still found in the Landeskirche, and intend to carry out this renunciation also in practice.

In the answer to the Ober-Consistorium it reads literally:

"As resolved as our will is to await further, with confidence in the Royal Ober-Consistorium, the further development of a truly Lutheran Church of Bavaria, just so resolved must we confess to our fatherly superiors that we 1. cannot acknowledge any communion at the Lord's Supper with the Reformed and Unionists; 2. that we cannot hold for Lutheran any pastor or other Christian who knowingly persists in such communion at the Lord's Supper; and 3. that in all our official and practical relations we must give effect to this our conviction, however hard, full of sighs and tears, it may at times become for ourselves."

I hope — so the correspondent writes further — this way will lead to a better goal than a hasty withdrawal; yea, the better we have come to know the German Landeskirchen, the more plainly have we had to perceive that not the remaining therein, but the running away would now conflict with conscience; for the orthodox are therein only little hampered and oppressed in the conduct of their office, and even the practical carrying out of the Confession is no longer impossible to them, to say nothing of the Confession itself. In any case the decided Lutheran preachers must first see what happens to them when, true to their Church, they administer their office."

"Here in Bavaria the so-called strict Lutherans are divided into two camps sharply opposed to one another, into the adherents