# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1856_S248
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

248 A Reply Letter from the Editor to a dear Friend etc.

If you will take the trouble to read an essay of mine under the title "Christendom and Confession" in the Kirchenblatt of the year 1850, p. 168ff., you will find that I already held years ago the same conviction which I felt moved to express once more in No. 3 of this year's Kirchenblatt. — I note this only because it is so. For I am not one of those who consider it a disgrace to abandon an opinion once held, out of shame at having erred. For I hold that whoever wishes to arrive at the truth must always be ready to confess that he has erred, and I am certain that here too it holds true: when I am weak, then I am strong. But thank God that your letter assures me that in this point you are of the same mind as I.

As in the year 1850, so I still hold today the view that we ought not to confine the boundaries of Christendom to the Lutheran church, but must set them as wide as Word and Sacrament reach. This is to say, however, that there are believing members of Christ on earth outside the visible fellowship of the Lutheran church. These, together with the living-believing members of the Lutheran church, evidently form — all living-believing Christians, whatever outward ecclesiastical fellowships they may belong to — a unity, a concrete (real, essential) whole. The truth that living-believing Christians are bound to one another by an essential though invisible bond had to be recognized already in the ancient times of the church by the first Christians; since the church was full of tares, they had to recognize as belonging together the wheat which they saw standing amid the tares. And if a passage from the letters of Gregory the Great which I find quoted somewhere is accurate, then this was expressed already at an early date, and indeed by men who were anything but indifferent to outward churchmanship and who well understood its significance; for accordingly the same writer states (Ep. I ad Ep. Neapol.): "Only the righteous, the virtuous, make up the body of Christ or the true church, which is as it were the vineyard that, from the pious Abel down to the last of the elect, brings forth as many vines as there are righteous ones." But when, through the Reformation, a split arose in western Christendom which divided it into two great halves, those who sought salvation not in outward connection with the historically transmitted churchmanship, but in personal faith in the gospel, were of necessity led to see the true church as not confined and enclosed within the bounds of any outward union and fellowship, but had to teach and confess that, wherever the voice of the gospel resounds, men can be led to living, justifying faith, and that this must also come to pass, because the Word of God cannot return void; — yet the people who believed livingly in Christ they could not possibly