# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1855_S53
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Holy Preaching Office. 53

Is the chief doctrine of justification by grace and faith impaired by Wucherer’s views? Most certainly, if indeed they are not biblical. The confessional writings and most of the most highly regarded dogmaticians of the Lutheran Church likewise know nothing of them, as has already been brought to light, in opposition to the confident assertions of others, by excellent and diligent compilations of evidence. The seeds of Romanizing ideas are indeed found among the opponents of Spener and his friends; but the theologians before them teach unanimously with Luther and are merely misunderstood when a different opinion is imposed upon them. On these points the reaction of the nobler Pietists was pure, for they never intended to depart from the Lutheran confession at all, although, unnoticed, their subjective tendency led them to abandon its position to some degree. Yet Rationalism was never born from them; rather, as history shows, it arose as a necessary consequence of the spiritual death and complete decay of ecclesiastical orthodoxy, together with influences from outside. They were, rather, still a salt that for a time barely held back the corruption. — It is a fortunate inconsistency among those Lutherans that, together with the confessional books, they permit the laity in casu necessitatis to perform acts belonging to the office (Wucherer, p. 105), as among the Roman Catholics; relatively speaking, however, they by no means ascribe to such acts the significance and validity of those performed by preachers; see Wucherer, p. 118 ff. This, moreover, follows of itself from the fact that, in the passage from the Smalcald Articles in Wucherer, p. 106, line 1, they do not understand ordinationem as installation into the office in the broader sense, in the name of the congregation; compare above, pp. 16–19. Nor does the harm lie here; rather, it lies much deeper and is therefore all the more difficult. This is altogether contrary to the analogia fidei. Among confessors of the pure Gospel, it is a unanimously held principle that faith in that Gospel is the sole condition of salvation on man’s part, wrought by God. For our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God and the incarnate Reconciler, the foundation of our salvation, is in himself a rock; (and the whole body of doctrine concerning him, his office, and his work is in itself a fundamentum dogmaticum or doctrinale, just as he himself is a fundamentum reale or substantiale;) only by allowing himself to be appropriated through faith by means of the doctrine and preaching concerning himself does he, the one new man, in his self-mediation with the fallen child of Adam, become a rock for others. The Father reveals the Son in the human heart through the Spirit of faith, and from faith arises the Church, which is nothing other than the fellowship of those who have Christ, just as our first parents did in Paradise through the Protevangelium. Accordingly, the Church must have received the Word directly from God himself through faith, because faith is the sole condition for partaking of Christ. If, then, the Church is to be built upon Christ and continually upon the office that receives from him the confession