# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1860_S39
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— Page 39 —

spring from which it flows. Without justification, absolution would
be an absurdity.

B., from the fact that through the pure Lutheran doctrine of
absolution, justification is not only explained, elucidated, and
glorified as a free, fully-won gift of grace from God, received
solely through faith, but also, and above all, that through private
absolution the doctrine of justification is made truly comforting
and appropriable to the individual sinner; for in absolution the
justification by grace is not assigned to him as something standing
far off, to be won only after long penitential struggles and
preparations, but as a fully-won gift, brought near to each
individual through the Word of the Gospel.

C. The close connection of the two doctrines becomes still
clearer when we consider how the corruption of the doctrine of
absolution either presupposes or entails a corresponding false
doctrine of justification. This will become the more evident to us
if we demonstrate it through individual examples.

1. The papist doctrine of confession, as a satisfaction for sin,
with its necessary enumeration of all sins, and the papist doctrine
of absolution, as a judicial act of the confessor, along with the
"false key" — must necessarily rob the poor sinner of the comfort of
justification, indeed destroy justification itself; and conversely,
the whole papist doctrine of absolution is the inevitable consequence
of their false doctrine of justification as a grace earned through
merit *de congruo* and *de condigno* (through fitting merit and full
condign merit).

2. The Reformed doctrine of a *decretum absolutum* (an
unconditional decree) and of a *voluntas signi et beneplaciti* (a
revealed will of God and a secret will of God) renders the comfort
of absolution void, much like the "false key," so that no one can be
certain that his sins are forgiven before God in heaven through his
confessor's absolution; further, in that they declare absolution to
be an empty proclamation of the forgiveness of sins, they remove the
ordinary means, the bridge and the footpath, by which the grace of
justification becomes our own; finally, they assign faith an entirely
false position, turning it into something by which justification is
to be won through prayer and inward effort, rather than letting it be
what it is: the hand that receives the grace held out to it.

The Methodist rejection of absolution as a genuine conveyance of
the forgiveness of sins is at bottom nothing other than a repetition
of the Reformed false doctrine; in particular, the conflation of
justification and sanctification, of forgiveness and its assurance
in the heart — which is a fundamental trait of Methodism — must
partly render absolution useless and partly rob it of its comfort.

3. Pietism within the Lutheran Church has, to be sure, put
forward no distinct doctrine of absolution; but through its
unevangelical emphasis on the first part of repentance, through its
anxiety-inducing classification of states of the soul, through its
warning — out of proportion to the office of comfort — against the
abusive appropriation of