# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1857_S262
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

262 Real-Encyclopedia for Protestant Theology and Church.

hidden essence of his condition; it reaches to the innermost core of his life, according to which he is implanted by faith into the substance of the God-man life of Christ." So, despite all safeguarding and qualification, essentially nothing else than the old Osiandrian doctrine of justification, and an unvarnished, actual denial of the biblical, Lutheran doctrine of the justification of the poor sinner before God out of free grace, by faith alone, for Christ's sake. For that doctrine — though unshakably grounded in God's clear Word, and held fast by the true Protestant church out of the most inward, most living, most certain conviction, wrought by the Holy Spirit Himself — is called a notion, and thus a human thought and opinion; and the actus forensis, or judicial act by which God declares the sinner who believes in Christ pure and righteous, is declared to be an arbitrary one, just as though there were no vicarious active and passive obedience of Christ, no satisfaction, no fully valid merit of the Redeemer, and as though this righteousness of Christ, brought about for us poor, lost, and condemned sinners, did not have to be grasped and appropriated in faith out of the gospel. For precisely that is rejected as false and erroneous in which consists the highest praise of God's merciful love, the greatest honor and the divine power of the merit of Christ, the most blessed light and the sweetest comfort of the gospel: namely, that God does in fact declare poor, fallen man pure and righteous in contradiction to his actual condition, which is indeed simply sinful and damnable. Justification is instead presented as a disclosure of the hidden essence of the condition of the sinner who believes in Christ, according to which he is implanted by faith into the substance of the God-man life of Christ; and thus, according to this doctrine, in truly papistic fashion the poor sinner is declared righteous for the very reason that he is now really and essentially righteous, so that the justifying element of faith is placed not in this, that it grasps and appropriates to us the vicarious satisfaction and the fully valid merit of Christ, but in this, that the sinner is by faith implanted into the substance of the God-man life of Christ, that his being is penetrated with the powers of the divine life of Christ, in short, that he is thus essentially made righteous. And so teaches Julius Müller, a star of the first magnitude among the modern-believing Union theologians, among the men who are so ready with tongue and pen to persuade simple, unsuspecting Lutherans that the Union people stand with them on the very same ground, namely the justification of the poor sinner before God through faith in Christ, and that the differences of doctrine concern only less important side points, which surely ought not to prevent brethren, sons of one mother, from uniting in love instead of tearing at their own bowels. Not for me the brotherhood with unbelievers. For there, as the above example shows as clearly as the sun, there is never a common ground. No,