# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1857_S8
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

8                         On the Efficacy of the Sacraments.

and, indeed for a better grounding, let us also, along with them, recognize and hold fast that the sacraments have this very efficacy of theirs from the Word — as already our dear Catechism, which unfortunately the learned theologians of our time seem little to know or practice, so gloriously answers the question in the Fourth Chief Part: "How can water do such great things?" "Water indeed does not do it, but the Word of God which is with and beside the water, and the faith which trusts such Word of God in the water"; likewise in the Sixth Chief Part: "Eating and drinking indeed do not do it, but the words that stand there: 'given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins' .... whoever believes these words has what they say and as they read, namely: the forgiveness of sins"; and the Smalcald Articles, in the passage cited, say: "and therefore we do not hold with Thomas and the preaching friars, who forget the Word (God's institution) and say that God has laid a spiritual power into the water, which washes away sin through the water"; and Augustine, in his tract on John, testifies so excellently when he says: "whence comes this so great power of the water, that it touches the body and washes the heart clean? Not unless through the working of the Word — not because it is spoken, but because it is believed." —

But if Word and sacrament have the same efficacy, then the question of how the sacraments actually work is easily answered. We need only call to mind how the Word of the gospel works savingly, and then draw the sure conclusion that the right, salutary efficacy of the sacraments is constituted in just the same way and no other. Now it is beyond dispute that the Word of the gospel works in this way: that God has placed into it, as into a blessed means of conveyance, the treasure of Christ's merit and all the goods of salvation acquired for us through Christ; that he offers these to us therein, thereby addressing himself first to our faculty of understanding, penetrating through it into our heart, and, where he finds no persisting, malicious, and stubborn resistance, works faith, and nourishes, strengthens, and preserves the faith once worked. Thus without faith there is no salutary efficacy of the Word. Only when we receive it in faith is it to us a fragrance of life unto life. Rejected in unbelief, it becomes to us a fragrance of death unto death. — Just so must we now think of the efficacy of the sacraments as well, as indeed the Augsburg Confession already confesses in its Thirteenth Article:

"Of the use of the sacraments it is taught that the sacraments were instituted not only to be marks of profession among men, but rather to be signs and testimonies of the will of God toward us, instituted to awaken and strengthen faith in those who use them. Wherefore they also require faith, and they are rightly used when they are received in faith, and faith is thereby strengthened." —

And that this is the plain divine truth and the doctrine expressly declared