# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 12 07_S1013
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Supplement to No. 11, Volume 9, of the Lutheraner.

(Contributed by Pastor Fürbringer in Freistatt and Kirchhain, Wisc.)

Historical-Theological Contribution

toward a fuller judgment of the disputes between the Grabauians and the so-called Missourians.

(Continuation.)

Offensive quarrels followed upon this separation in the course of the same year, brought about by Krause's obstinacy, wherein, alas, not everything can be excused that occurred on the part of individuals among his opponents. But let it be considered by what treatment they had been provoked. The wrongs committed from below are outweighed by the wrong that from above begot them. It even comes about in Freistatt, through Pastor Krause, under whose direction the part that remained faithful and favorable to him made the beginning, by reason of the church property, to civil lawsuits; after the conclusion of these both parties willingly divided among themselves, by lot, of which the first fell to Krause's adherents, the church, the parsonage and the land belonging thereto, and the separated party received the church building with half of the land. Let one compare with this — to put it as mildly as possible — the wholly partisan report of Grabau in his 2nd Synodical Letter, which is altogether a strange web of truth, lying distortion, perversion and slander, and which spares not even the pious departed in Wisconsin, as in Missouri. In the meantime the Kirchhainers endeavor, especially as there were also among them many scrupulous persons, though regarded with distrust by those who had withdrawn in Freistatt, to establish peace and unity; and in January 1847 they hold a congregational meeting, where they, the pastor and his church members, chiefly at the instance of the warden Retzlaff, of the schoolteacher Stiemke, who pointed to St. John's Gospel, chapter 17, and to the excellent, highly judicious Jacob Andreä and his true unification and union by means of successive formulas of concord, and of others besides, adopt the resolution to induce the Buffalo Synod to bring about a conference with the Missourian preachers, in order to settle the pending disputes. This proposal is not accepted, and Kindermann, who had at first himself recognized and testified before the whole congregation that it was God's work, will have nothing more to do with it. When now, at the judicial proceedings of the Freistatt lawsuit, Krause had given great offense by his, alas, unworthy conduct, he was represented in a penitential-day sermon of the spring of 1847 by his Kirchhain fellow-minister as an innocent man, who had suffered and been derided for the sake of Christ and His holy office, even as the Lord Himself before the court at Jerusalem, and all those, even by the Kirchhainers and newly arrived immigrants, were declared to be no Christians who still maintained fellowship or intercourse with his opponents in Freistatt. Kindermann had formerly instilled into his congregation a grave suspicion against Krause; now he rebuked those who accordingly kept themselves aloof from him and reminded him kindly of it; he had declared that the Missourian pastors were upright preachers, that the sending of Geyer to Wisconsin was a quite different matter from Pastor Klügel's assumption of office, that he himself had given his congregation near Watertown permission to call another preacher, that this man also had not gone hither on his own way but according to the order of the Church, and that he would enter into correspondence with Pastor Walther in St. Louis, etc. — now he sided with those who called Geyer a sectarian preacher and his call an ungodly one; and, like Krause, with railing and raging, in spite of all admonitions, he even from the pulpit attacked those with whom he had formerly stood in God-pleasing concord. One has no conception of what personalities these so-called shepherds of the sheep presume to bring into the pulpit, which is directly contrary to all Lutheran church order. Wounded in the most sensitive and deepest manner, some of the members of his congregation who had hitherto been among his most faithful make a petition to the Church Ministerium in Buffalo, which naturally lacked the form that would have been right and acceptable to it, and received half a year afterward the answer, composed, to be sure, in somewhat more polished style. Thereupon Kindermann declares in a public congregational meeting: I see here 2 parties; those who agree with the written answer I heartily approve and am their pastor; the others may write for themselves (— namely, answer the Church Ministerium again —), and join themselves to the Town-Nine-ers (— that is, to the so-called Rotters, those separated from Pastor Krause —). Thus the Buffalo Synod had once more brought about the division in Kirchhain solely by its own fault and blindness. For those who were thus themselves thrust out and reviled by their opponents sought Word and Sacraments from Pastor Keyl, who in the meantime had been called in September 1847 to Milwaukie and Freistatt, and with whom they united 4 weeks after their letter of renunciation. To the congregations of the Buffalo Synod, for reasons easily understood, the veil remained hanging before the eyes of their hearts, which had been spread over them; and even though the separated, in Freistatt or in Kirchhain, have here and there in part sinned through indiscretion or even impure conduct: the ban which fell upon them from their former preachers, unfaithful to God's Word, and the so-called wretched degrees of it, are abominable before the Most Holy, and deserved to be despised of men.

How can there be any talk of church discipline here at all, since in such a proceeding the pastors themselves ought rather to have fallen under it! The part separated from Krause had, after the first admonition, already rightly renounced the whole Church Ministerium, and the manner in which they were summoned to return gave evidence of the same perverse, unbroken, haughty spirit with which they had hitherto been dealt with, so that it could not possibly bear the name of the steps of church discipline. Among the Kirchhainers such steps did not even occur in their order according to Christ's command, and that they answered the last summons foolishly, as fools, is to be ascribed to the unspeakably loveless hardness of heart of the former, which they then again concealed under a hypocritical admonition to repentance. That the separated in Kirchhain had already earlier for a time not gone to the Sacrament of the Altar, because they did not approve of Kindermann's fellowship with Krause, had for its ground that earnest zeal for right church unity which, among the Lutheran-minded Prussians, only too often, alas, goes astray in its aim. What an abominable abomination, on the other hand, is it before God's eyes and the holy Church, the spiteful denouncing from the pulpit by these preachers, which they, in contempt of the words of Christ, Matt. 18, 15., defiantly arrogate to themselves, as it were by virtue of office! Let one consider, on the other hand, what the reverend Martin Chemnitz says to the ministers of the Church in his Harmony on this passage. The first voice of opposition, which in a communion corrupted in doctrine and life speaks in accordance with the Word of God, let it come from whatever mouth it will, takes place at the bidding, as Luther says, that is, through the working of the invisible Church, and this, as the mother of us all, must be heard on pain of the loss of salvation; she alone also has the right from God to open and to shut the kingdom of heaven; the preachers are only the stewards, the servants, the administrators of that which belongs to the children, the heirs; happy are they if they themselves as children