# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1899_S29
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Ninth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1899. 29

the working of the devil, who is at work in the children of
unbelief. If one could pound the natural man in a mortar and then put
him back together again, what would always come out would still be a
person wanting to be saved by his own doing. "Works," says our
confession,*) "strike people's eyes. Human reason admires these by
nature, and because it sees only the works, it does not understand
or heed faith; therefore it dreams that these works earn forgiveness
of sins and justify. This opinion of the Law is by nature lodged in
the hearts of men and cannot be driven out" — that is, by natural
means. Here all human training and education are utterly powerless.
No human training or education can free a person from the opinio
legis [the law's own opinion (of itself)] — that is, from the false
opinion that he must be saved by himself. But the church can do it,
through the divine power of the divine word entrusted to it. The
divine word of the Law is like a hammer that shatters rock and
smashes down the edifice of human righteousness. The divine word of
the gospel is the word that leads the one broken by the Law to the
cross of Christ, and teaches him to desire, accept, and praise as the
only salvation the cross he had hitherto despised. Thus the church,
in accordance with its commission, makes children of God out of
children of the world. This the church accomplishes through the
proclamation of the word entrusted to it.

The church can lose this effectiveness upon the world in only one
way: if it begins, to speak with Luther, "monkey business" — that
is, if it abandons God's word and tries to convert the world to
Christ by all sorts of means and little devices invented by men. The
church of God must be on guard against so-called "new measures."
What are impermissible "new measures" in the church? Not new outward
ways of bringing God's word to the world — these may be required by
circumstances — but one resorts to objectionable new measures when
one tries, by other means, to accomplish what only God's word can and
should accomplish, namely, to convert to Christ and keep in Christ,
to make people members of the Christian church and keep them in the
Christian church. Yes, if the church — to speak with our confession —
were an outward polity, that is, a merely outward assembly of
people! Such an outward assembly could well be brought about by all
sorts of worldly means and little devices. Then one could, depending
on circumstances, build the church with cannons or with oyster
suppers. But the church is, in fact, the fellowship of those who
believe the gospel. So the church will be built by nothing other than
the preaching of the gospel.

*) Apologie, Müller, S. 134, § 144.