# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S37
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Tenth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1902. 37

...back to Christ and instead put man's works in the foreground. This is
evidence that people, when in matters of religion they follow their own
thinking instead of God's word, are ignorant, blind, foolish, mad, and
raving. They are as senseless as someone who wants to have fruit and thinks
he can reach his goal by destroying the tree that produces the fruit. No —
there is an unshakeable order between faith in Christ and good works. Faith
in Christ stands in the first place, and good works stand in the second
place. Whoever wants to move works into the first place thereby destroys the
good works. Good works must remain in the second place, or they do not
stand at all — that is, they do not exist at all. Apart from faith in
Christ there is an outward, civic, natural morality that has its value for
civic life, but it is not Christian morality, not good works, because apart
from faith in Christ there is no Holy Spirit, no mind set on God, no love
for God. One can, of course, speak of love for God apart from Christ. The
heathen have done so. The papists, the Unitarians, the lodges, etc., do so
too. But the talk remains mere talk. Since the Fall, love for God and for
one's neighbor is planted in the human heart in only one way: through faith
in Christ, the Savior of sinners. Therefore all those who, together with
Harnack and all teachers of works, would place the essence of Christianity
in human morality instead of in faith in Christ are enemies and destroyers
of all good works. The Christian church must remain unentangled with them.

4.

The Christian church is to make people wise and discerning — so wise and
discerning that in religious matters they can clearly and surely
distinguish between truth and error. "Ye shall know the truth," says the
Lord Christ of those who belong to his church, John 8:32.

But when, and by what means, does spiritual understanding enter a person?
St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 2:15: "He that is spiritual judgeth all
things, yet he himself is judged of no man." Who is the "spiritual" one
here? According to the context of the text, this is not, say, the pastor or
some especially gifted person in the church, but every Christian — that is,
every person who has come to know and accept the gospel of Christ in faith,
who knows that one has a gracious God and salvation not through one's own
works but through faith in Christ the Crucified. This is what the apostle
Paul preached at Corinth and everywhere, as he reports in the very same
place, 1 Corinthians 2:2: "For I determined not to know any thing among
you, save