# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1856_S180
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...word; the word that looses the penitent from sin, guilt, and punishment — the word of the Gospel — the church speaks in such a case of church discipline to an individual person not merely on its own behalf, but Christ wills it to be acknowledged as His own word. Already from verse 18, then, we might conclude that when a Christian falls into temptation on account of his sins, or into anxious doubt concerning his membership in the kingdom of heaven, and his friend, preacher, wife, or child comforts him with the Gospel and assures him of his membership in the kingdom of heaven, such comfort and assurance ought to be as firm and certain as if the Lord Christ himself had spoken it to him with his own mouth; and finally, that all preaching of the Law and the Gospel, insofar as it agrees with Scripture, is the Lord Christ's own preaching, for which he uses his Christians simply as tools and servants. But we need not draw this lofty doctrine from verse 18 at all; rather it is expressly stated in John 20:23 and Luke 10:16, so that the assurance in Matthew 18:18 appears as the application of that general doctrine to the particular case of church discipline. John 20:23 is, to be sure, interpreted by the essay "Confession and Absolution" as follows: in the early church, sicknesses were held to be punishments for sin, and so it came about that a miraculous healing was regarded as the forgiveness of sins, since the punishment then ceased, or, in other words, was remitted; this is shown, it says, by Matthew 9:2 and John 9:2; thus Jesus often said to the sick whom he healed: "Your sins are forgiven you; sin no more, lest something worse befall you"; according to this interpretation, the power to forgive sins conferred on the apostles refers to the miraculous healings which they were to perform, after Christ's example, by the power of the Holy Spirit. — This interpretation, from which the smell of death of rationalism wafts toward us, is supposed, according to that essay, to be given by Scripture itself in Matthew 9:2 and John 9:2. But the opinion expressed by the disciples in John 9:2, that the blindness of that man born blind must be the punishment for some particular sin, the Lord Christ rejects in the following third verse — not as though he wished to deny that death, and therefore sickness and other evil, is the wages of sin, but rather to show that one may not conclude from a single evil to a single personal sin. Just as little, then, may one hold that with the removal of a particular punishment, such as an illness, a particular sin is also forgiven, for such an opinion would rest on precisely the error expressed by the apostles in verse 2. Had the Lord Christ, in this sense, called his healing of the sick a forgiveness of sins, he would thereby have confirmed an error. But to take a healing of the sick as a forgiveness not merely of a single sin, but of the sin that clings to a person as such, is something not even John 9:2 permits, still less Matthew 9:2. With the word of Matthew 9:2, "your sins are forgiven you," has