# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1856_S250
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

—dearest friend, now say that the "properly" is meant to express what the church ought to be; against this, however, I say: when someone wishes to describe what a thing is, he does not mean to say what it ought to be but is not, and the confessors of the Augsburg Confession would have done something very perverse if, instead of expressing in their confession of faith their conviction of what the church is, they had said what it properly ought to be. On that point they would easily have agreed with their opponents, that it is desirable that all members of the church be truly believers; and it is plainly not the purpose of their confession concerning the church to give a picture of the church as it ought to be, but only to say what the church of Christ on earth is. As here the Augsburg Confession, so too Luther, when he says in the Smalcald Articles (Art. XII): "A boy of seven years knows nowadays, thank God, what the church is" — he means, through the boy's mouth, to express what the church, as it presently stands, really and properly is. And when he adds: "namely, the believers, the saints, the little sheep who hear the voice of their shepherd," he gives a description of the church quite identical with that of the 7th Article of the Augsburg Confession. But the chief point is this: did the Reformers then believe that the church, here on earth, as to its outward appearance, would ever present any other picture than that of a net in which all sorts of things are found? How could it possibly have occurred to them to wish to give, in a churchly confession of faith, a description of the church as it will never be on earth?

An unimpeachable interpreter of the Augsburg Confession is without doubt its own Apology. I confess I feel tempted simply to point to the article of the Apology on the church, since that article is chiefly occupied with justifying the description of the church given in the 7th Article of the Augsburg Confession, and indeed in the sense I have maintained. But of course you, dearest friend, have read this article, as have I. I must therefore hold up to you individual passages from it, and here I do not see how you can maintain your view against, for instance, the following passage: "Thus the church is also described by the article in the (apostles') creed, which bids us believe in a general (holy) church. The godless, however, are not the holy church, and it seems that what follows (in the article), namely: the communion of saints, was added in order to explain what (the word) church means, namely, the assembly of the saints who stand among themselves in the fellowship of the same gospel and of the same Holy Spirit, who renews, sanctifies, and governs their hearts" (p. 145). To this I add at once what Luther says in the Large Catechism, in his explanation of the third article, where he explains the words communio sanctorum and rejects the translation "fellowship of the saints." He says (p. 499): in proper, genuine German it had to be translated "a congregation of saints," that is, such a congre—