# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S29
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Tenth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1902. 29

...the Jews, who sought to establish their own righteousness, the testimony
"that they are zealous for God," Rom. 10:2. Such people are, in one
respect, dearer to us than the coarse slaves of vice who live after their
lusts without shame. The righteousness of works, the justitia operum, has
— as our Confessions also repeatedly emphasize — great value for the state
and civil life. We live undisturbed in society more among honorable than
among vicious people. God rewards even natural honorableness with earthly
goods. But the perverse thing is this: when someone wishes to plead before
God what has value in the state and in civil life, and thereby to become
righteous and be saved before God. The apostle Paul, as we have heard,
does indeed give the Jews, who sought to establish their own righteousness
before God, the testimony that they are zealous for God, but adds: "but
not according to knowledge," Rom. 10:2. They are zealous as those who do
not understand the matter, who are spiritually blind. Accordingly we say:
whoever, with Professor Harnack, places the essence of Christianity not in
faith in Christ but in man's own morality is not yet right in the head
spiritually — he is still blind, stone-blind; he has as yet no notion of
the essence of Christianity; he still confuses heathenism and
Christianity; he is still stuck in the religion of the flesh. Scripture
declares this expressly.

The flesh expresses itself with regard to religion in a twofold way. In
one part of mankind it says: There is no God, no heaven, and no hell. All
religion is foolishness. Let us eat and drink. That is the materialistic
flesh. In another part, the flesh of man says: There is a God, and to come
to God one must avoid sin and do good. This is the religious flesh. But it
is nonetheless flesh. When someone wishes to come to God through his own
morality, through his own works, Scripture calls that the flesh. When the
Galatians, led astray by Jewish false teachers, had fallen from the Gospel
to the Law, when, instead of through faith in Christ, they also wished to
become righteous before God through their own works, the apostle Paul
cries out to them, Gal. 3:1, 3: "O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched
you, that ye should not obey the truth? . . . Having begun in the Spirit,
are ye now made perfect by the flesh?" It is therefore called being
carnally minded and walking after the flesh when someone wishes to come to
God through his own doing. God's judgment here differs from man's
judgment. It impresses us men, or, to speak with Luther, it "makes
people's mouths gape open," when someone honestly takes pains, or at least
seems honestly to take pains, to earn heaven through an outwardly upright
life according to the prescription of the Law — even with watching,
fasting, self-mortification, and other particular works...