# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1856_S142
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

142 Is This, Then, the Theology of the American Lutheran Church?

...Holy Baptism seeks to create the impression that our confession teaches that a man is regenerated through Holy Baptism without any real or living faith of his own. Our confessions, however, as the very passages cited in both newspaper articles prove, teach that the gracious effects of Holy Baptism — the forgiveness of sins, deliverance from death and the devil, and eternal salvation — become the portion of all who believe, according to the words and promise of God at Holy Baptism. Whoever does not believe — and by the word "believe" our confession always means only living faith, which belongs together with repentance and, together with it, constitutes contrition — whoever does not believe, to him baptism becomes a judgment. We affirm the necessity of baptism on the ground of our Lord Christ's command, but teach with one accord that only he is lost who despises Holy Baptism, not he who, through no fault of his own, was deprived of Holy Baptism (Contemptus, non privatio damnat — "contempt, not privation, condemns," as it is said regarding the Holy Sacraments). How is it that the authors of the articles in question in the Observer fail to see what our schoolchildren could show anyone — that our confessions look for (living) faith in the one who is to receive the glorious gracious effects of Holy Baptism: forgiveness of sin, deliverance from death and the devil, and eternal salvation? Whence this misunderstanding of a doctrine set forth so exceedingly clearly — a doctrine which, for example, in the third question of the fourth chief part of the Small Catechism, names first the already-mentioned gracious effects of baptism, and second the manner in which one receives them, namely through faith in the word and promise of God joined with the water? Does it have its ground in an extraordinary lack of understanding of the nature of Christian faith? That such a lack exists here in this country is shown by the fact that other papers here too (for example, recently the New York Evangelist) assert that Scripture teaches regeneration not through baptism but through faith — just as if those who, with Scripture, call baptism the washing of regeneration were not thereby ascribing regeneration precisely to the faith that lays hold of baptism. Evidently one cannot conceive that the Christian, saving faith is precisely that faith which grounds itself upon God's Word and the Holy Sacraments. But upon what, then, does one wish to ground faith? Answer: upon Christ. But does Christ not come to us through Word and Sacrament? Does he come to us through anything else at all besides Word and Sacrament? Whoever grounds his faith on anything other than Word and Sacrament certainly does not ground it on anything that God has appointed as the ground of faith; he chooses for himself his own ground of faith, he invents for himself his own Christ, and misses the Christ whom Scripture, and the holy Christian Church in accordance with Scripture, preaches. Feeling, prayer, the preaching office, the priesthood, the sacrifice of the Mass, pilgrimages, alms, bequests, the Virgin Mary, relics, and whatever else has one