# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1855_S167
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded, Etc. 167

the most deeply fallen, most wretched and depraved sinner, long since cast out by the morally respectable world and long since given up by all physicians of the Law as hopelessly incurable, who has been awakened from his sleep of sin by the work of the Law, terrified by the greatness and multitude of his sins and by the knowledge of his corrupt nature tainted by original sin, and who has become sincerely sorrowful in a godly way and hungry and thirsty for righteousness before God, may gain confidence in God’s grace in Christ and, by believingly grasping, appropriating, and holding fast to Christ and His merit, may obtain from such evangelical preaching the forgiveness of sins, righteousness before God, the Holy Spirit, adoption as God’s child, and eternal life; for to snatch precisely such sinners from the dominion of darkness and from the jaws of the hellish wolf, to transfer them into the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom they have redemption through His blood, namely, the forgiveness of sins, and finally to help them attain the inheritance of the saints in light, eternal salvation and glory—this is truly a greater triumph of the divine power of the Gospel and of its pure and unadulterated proclamation than that Joseph, Samuel, Daniel, Simon, Hannah, Mary, Lazarus’s sister, Nathanael, John, and others should attain the same goal through the same means.

This, then, is the genuine and proper Christian, biblical, ecclesiastical—that is, Lutheran—proclamation of the Gospel: that in it, above all things and at all times, the great deed of God, the grace of the Father, the merit of the Son, and the power of the Holy Spirit are thoroughly set forth before the congregations and attested with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, for which great human gifts of oratory are not required.

But then, of course, the teaching must not be omitted as to how man’s faith relates to this deed of God. Among the Papists, as is well known, it is weakened and reduced to an outward assent to the truth of Holy Scripture; among the enthusiasts (Methodists, followers of Albrecht, and the like), it is in part mixed into evangelical doctrine in an exceedingly confused and obscure manner, and in part deprived of its dignity and power by the teaching that it justifies before God only together with works. With regard to the obscure teaching about faith in the sermons of the enthusiasts—none of whom, moreover, has any conception of the coherence of evangelical doctrine in its individual articles—faith in Christ is very frequently put in place of the grace of God or the merit of Christ and is most clumsily and confusingly mixed into the Second Article, as though it were through faith that man had been redeemed, or as though faith at least contributed to redemption and reconciliation with God. For these irresponsible, flighty spirits, the enthusiastic preachers, in their confused jumble do not distinguish the gracious will and counsel of God for the redemption of the human race, together with the all-sufficient and fully valid work of Christ’s atonement and redemption that carries out this counsel (or His acquisition and merit)