# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1857_S53
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From a Letter of a Preacher of the Missouri Synod to a Fellow Minister, etc. 53

into the believers' hearts, and therefore they also spoke; and if faith had not originally been worked in sinful men, no church and no office of the Gospel would ever have found place among them; just as, to this very day, the Holy Spirit — whom only believers, and not the world, can receive — is the efficient cause, through the general Christian consciousness that has its origin from those believers, that an outward fellowship of those who call themselves Christians exists. From this it follows further, of necessity: 1. that all hypocrites and godless persons can indeed be members of a false visible fellowship as such, but never of the true visible Church as such, because the latter is only the adequate manifestation of the invisible Church (although they are found within the outward fellowship of the true visible Church as well, just as the weeds are no part of the wheat field as such, but only a part of the field, insofar as the field forms a whole consisting of wheat and weeds; and only in this respect — since the whole body of confessors is called, by synecdoche, the Church — are they called dead members of it). 2. Where Word and Sacrament are still present, in which, insofar as they are pure, the Church of Christ becomes visible, and insofar as they are falsified, Satan's school becomes visible — for example, baptism into the triune God: there they are (although, in sectarian parties — such as the Roman, the Reformed, the Union church, etc. — human ordinances and rationalist conceit have defiled the confession, apart from these corruptions) precisely marks that true believers are to be found hidden among them. Any one of these does not by itself constitute a church; but it is impossible that, where fragments of the truth remain in the confession, two or three, etc., should not be added to the one — indeed many, wherever the essence of baptism has remained; and where only two or three gather together in Jesus' name, there is a church — (here the indefinite article is meant, not the numeral — as the Smalcald Articles attest, Rechenberg's German edition, p. 554, Latin p. 345) — for whose sake even an entire schism still bears this name by synecdoche; and that individual as well as these, in the midst of the erring multitude, are members of the Church, of the body of Jesus Christ. — Even within the Union church there is, though not the Lutheran church, yet secretly, and at the same time becoming manifest, a part of the general (invisible as well as visible) Church — (which the Lutheran church itself is likewise only, though it is the only one known to us with pure Word and Sacraments). Whoever among the Unionists comes to the recognition of his imprisonment — which encloses there the oppressed, sighing Church — is bound, on pain of losing salvation, to leave it and join an orthodox congregation. — If the Church, in the proper sense, is a visible thing through its office, which propagates itself exclusively by means of its own ordination, then the faith of the Gospel is not the fundamental condition of all salvation, but, alongside Christ — for whose sake alone the one who lays hold of him is justified — our Savior becomes a work of the Law, because