# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1856_S260
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

—of God is powerfully offered to them, and they have been called out from the rest of mankind by God's gracious call, so that they might, as a reward of the sufferings of the Son of God and through faith in Him, become blessed.

3. But not all who are called, baptized, and confess Christ are Christians who believe, and yet Scripture expressly says that only the believing baptized shall be saved. Therefore we are compelled to distinguish between Christian and Christian. And this we all do, dearest brother! Whether we make use of this designation or that — believing Christians, nominal Christians; Christians of the heart, Christians of the mouth only; living Christians, dead Christians; true Christians, false Christians — we all distinguish among those who nevertheless, the one as much as the other, belong to the same outward fellowship, namely the visible or confessing church of Christ. The necessity of distinguishing in this way is so unavoidable that even the Roman Catholic church, although it rejects the Reformers' definition of the church, has not been able to escape it. Thus Bellarmine calls the wicked "dead and withered members of the church." And the same author, in his effort to prove that catechumens, even if they believe, are not members of the church, says: "the church has a body and a soul, and so some belong to both the body and the soul of the church, some to the soul and not the body, and conversely some to the body and not the soul; the catechumens belong to the soul of the church." Bellarmine finds himself compelled, as these statements of his show, on the one hand to admit that not all members of the visible church are in a state of grace and on the way to salvation, and on the other hand he must concede, of those whom he regards as standing outside the church and who indeed, as not yet baptized, cannot outwardly be reckoned to it, that they nevertheless, in point of efficacy, belong to it — and so, against his own will, he sides with the Reformers on the matter. For, as Quenstedt puts it, what is at issue in this controversy is: "which are to be held as true and living members." And this question, too, was the one whose correct answer lay on the hearts of the Reformers as practical churchmen, and which moved them to set forth and defend their definition of the church, as indeed the Apology says (p. 146): "Although the wicked and hypocrites are associates of this true church with respect to outward rites, the church must nevertheless be described as being the living body of Christ, and church not only in name but in reality as well. And this for many reasons. For it must be made clear what it is that, in the first place, makes us members, and indeed living members, of the church. — — That we cannot avoid distinguishing, so long as God's church is on earth, between true and false members of it, and that we are compelled to mark out the true members from the false by attaching to them, in a special and proper sense, the name that by outward right belongs to all alike — this is taught us by the