# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1856_S254
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

—believers of outward Christendom, scattered as they are, an assembly, a congregation, and says that the assembly of believers is properly the church of Christ. This saying of Luther's is all the more important because it is found in the confession of faith appended to his great confession concerning the Holy Supper (from the year 1528) (vol. XIX, 525b). It reads: "Accordingly I believe that there is on earth a holy Christian church, that is, the congregation and number or assembly of all Christians in all the world, the one bride of Christ and his spiritual body, of which he is also the one Head; and that the bishops or pastors are not its heads, nor lords, nor bridegroom, but rather servants, friends, and (as the word bishop itself indicates) overseers, keepers, or guardians. And this same Christendom is not confined to the Roman church or the Pope, but is in all the world, as the prophets foretold that Christ's gospel should come into all the world, Ps. 2, Ps. 19. So that under the Pope, Turks, Persians, Tartars, and everywhere, Christendom is scattered bodily, but gathered spiritually, in one gospel and faith, under one Head, who is Jesus Christ."

That I have not erred in regarding and taking the definition of the church in the Augsburg Confession as a description of what the church, in the judgment of the Reformers, is (just as our old dogmaticians so understood it, they who likewise define the church "in the narrower sense" — sensu strictiori) — this, I believe, dearest friend, I have sufficiently proven above. But allow me to add one further remark. Evidently the Reformers, in the 7th Article of the Augsburg Confession, did not intend to give a description of the crowd which we commonly call church. Had they wished that, they could indeed have done so, and would have given a definition of the visible church. But that is precisely what they did not intend. The Reformers were practical men; in contemplating the church with its means of grace, the question that lay on their hearts was: who is made blessed through these means of grace? And with regard to this question they give their definition of the church, which contains within itself the correct answer to this question, namely, that those become blessed who truly believe (the vere credentes). Thus we see how their description of the church flowed from that of which their heart was full, namely from the conviction that man is justified and made blessed solely through faith in the gospel; — the wholly outward view of the church that had formed itself under the papacy, out of which was born the delusion, most ruinous to the soul's salvation, that whoever merely belongs to the church has salvation, drove the Reformers to set a spiritual view of the church over against the prevailing one, which wholly externalized it.

(Conclusion to follow.)