# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1855_S164
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

164 How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Established, etc.

Manner of presentation. For as concerns the former, it is clear and evident that those two enemies of the Lutheran Church obscure and falsify the pure and unadulterated preaching and exposition of the Law by mixing in a false gospel. The Papists, namely, not only deny, contrary to God’s Word, the sinfulness and condemnability of original sin, but also maintain, likewise contrary to Scripture, that the natural, unregenerate human being can by his own power and will dispose and prepare himself for grace in Christ, and indeed can merit grace for himself through love and good works; likewise, that not only the contrition of the heart, but even the mere desire for it, is meritorious before God and cooperates toward salvation, etc.

In the same way, however, the enthusiasts of every kind and stripe falsify the pure doctrine of the Law of the holy Ten Commandments by mixing in a fabricated gospel; for wherever they teach that “some” spiritual discipline and exercise, this or that exertion in prayer, or some special preparation brings it about that the Holy Spirit is received and faith in Christ is produced, there they mix, as it were, a false gospel into the Law and impede and prevent the latter, as God’s hammer and sword, from penetrating powerfully into the innermost heart, stripping the human being bare and empty of all his own strength and righteousness, and revealing to him the dreadful conflict and contradiction that exists between his nature and will and God’s rule and will.

But as concerns the form and manner of the preaching of the Law among Papists and enthusiasts, both are marked by the defect and bad practice that they generally sharply condemn only individual sins, especially the grosser ones—for example, among the Romanists the so-called mortal sins, and among the enthusiasts cursing, drunkenness, and so forth—and make them, as it were, run the gauntlet; but they do not attack the root of all these grosser outgrowths and eruptions, namely original sin and its condemnability, with the severity of the Law intended by God, nor do they lay the axe of the First and Tenth Commandments to the root of the tree of sin. Yet this is precisely the biblically sound and normative, that is, Lutheran manner of preaching the Law: it chiefly attacks the corruption of human nature caused by original sin and identifies and exposes the evil root, inborn unbelief and disobedience, within the individual sins as its evil fruits, and continually treats the proposition that an evil tree cannot bear good fruit, in such a way that it is not the evil fruits that make the tree evil, but, conversely, the rotten tree must necessarily produce corrupt fruit from itself.

With regard to the preaching of the Gospel, here too there is a great difference between the Lutheran, that is, ecclesial manner of preaching and that of the Papists and enthusiasts, both in form and in content.

The Papists, namely, just as above they mixed a false gospel into the Law and thereby blunted it from proving itself to be the sharp, two-edged