How the Missouri Synod is Judged in Germany Today.
[A review of an 1881 pamphlet by Pastor Rudolph Hoffmann of Germany]
By Pastor Ch. Hochstetter, Stonebridge, Canada.
%20(crop).jpg "Pastor J. A. A. Grabau")
Consider that Grabau declares the visible Lutheran Church to be the sole saving one, and bound the church that had emigrated from Prussia, as he called his synod, so firmly to his church government that he taught that where he did not recognize an ordination in a preacher or disputed his legitimate calling, the Holy Communion administered by such a preacher was "vain bread and wine", "an insolent game"! Thus, it was necessary to fight a Donatist enthusiasm in Grabau's presumption, which he used more and more in favor of his tyrannical practice. Just as the papacy, when it brought its claims to light, used the Pseudoisidoric decrees, so Grabau ostensibly relied on the Pomeranian church order, whereby he granted himself the right that is attached there to the Lutheran sovereign.
.png "Pope Pius IX")
Just as the previous Pope Pio nono [Pius IX] wrote to the German Kaiser eight years ago: “All that is baptized is mine”, so Grabau claimed that those excommunicated by him, if they had already converted to Missouri and had been expelled from his synod by Grabau, belonged to him, and that he would sue the Missourian preachers who had stolen his own from him on the very Last Day. There, where the Pope is considered the supreme giver of all spiritual power and grace, the Office of the Keys is basically a mere papal authority, from which it passes to the ordained priests, who are his creatures; according to the Buffalo doctrine, church government was in the hands of the so-called ministry and its seniors, so according to this doctrine the office of the keys was not a church’s power, as the Lutheran Catechism already teaches, but <page 75> a pastor’s power, and therefore the true existence of the sacraments and the preaching was connected to Grabau’s preacher’s power. The congregation as the so-called "household" was left with only the honor of listening and obeying the “teaching estate”, i.e. the gloria parendi [“the honor of obeying”], which even the Roman Jesuits left to the laity!
Of course, Grabau did not refer to Bellarmin, whose doctrine is repeated almost verbatim in Grabau, but to torn off passages of individual later dogmatists, to the practice of the German Consistories, which gradually also exercised a great power, to the later writings of Melanchthon, in the time of the Interim, and to preferring E. Neumeister, whom the later Stephanists also regarded as their guardian. Grabau used the controversial writings that E. Neumeister and other orthodoxists directed against the Pietists against the Missourians, and knew how to lead his followers out into the wide sea of a later Lutheran tradition. Shouldn't the same man, of whom Hoffmann writes that he was called by God to redeem the Stephanists from their madness, have been right to fight the Buffalo hierarchy, which is a web even more finely spun? Hoffmann writes [p. 16]: “The greater right was on the side of Missouri”, but Hoffmann is also opposed to the so-called democratic conception of church and office, that's why it says again on p. 32 that among the dark sides of Missouri belongs the Missouri constitution! Here church government and the power of the Keys is “transferred” to the individual congregation — that is an unbiblical and unlutheran radicalism!
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