# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1855_S54
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

54 On the Doctrine of the Holy Preaching Office.

leads, while faith is the first thing to which he reveals and imparts himself, then surely the office, insofar as it is carried out by human beings, can be established only together with faith. And if the believing church therefore has the authority to extend and continue this office in the world as a public ministry of the Word, how could or should it not confer that office, unless it did not itself possess the office? Cf. above, p. 18, note 13.” — God the Father saves originally, as the source of all good, through the giving of His only-begotten Son. Christ, the God-man, saves as Mediator through His redemption. The Holy Spirit saves through the imparting, preaching, and working of faith. Grace saves as the counsel of the triune God, resolved from eternity, to have mercy on the sinner. (Election saves because it is the cause that works—not faith, but our salvation insofar as it ensures that, for those whom God foreknew, everything in this life serves for salvation and all things are so ordered in advance that they actually attain faith and are preserved in it, although faith is therefore not a natural necessity, but proceeds from the will of the heart, which, through prevenient grace, has decided in favor of the good object of its fundamental impulse, until then averse to that object.) The Word, the Gospel, saves as the means and revelation of grace; Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as seals and confirmations of the Word; the church as the workshop from which the Holy Spirit works through the Word and the Sacraments; the office, and the one who holds it, as the instrument of the Word and the Sacraments. Faith saves as the effect of the power of the Word imparting itself to the human being. Works save as the fruits of faith arising from that same divine power, which declare faith to be such, prove it, and give assurance of it to the subject and to others. Faith, however, is that which, next to God Himself, His grace, and His Word and its signs, is indispensable for the existence of the others, and without which God also does not will to save through His grace, Word, and Sacraments. — All the ancient teachers are to be judged accordingly, and not according to preconceived opinions. So long as they do not deny faith as the sole saving condition and as the sum, root, seed, and essence of everything that flows from faith, they too are pure teachers. Each indeed has here and there his own distinctive manner of writing and formulation, but this must never be judged according to some other human form, but solely according to the holy Word of God. Only false teachers could later make use of such expressions for their own purposes; yet these expressions are not therefore false, since Scripture itself is exposed to the worst abuse.

Where true faith is, there is also the church, Chrysostomus already says (hom. 6 on St. Matthew); but where the former is not, neither is the latter. The traditional confession of each member of this church as fides, quae creditur, and its formal principle, the Word given first, are to permeate one another intimately in this: that without faith (fides, qua creditur) the