# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1858_S14
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

14 The Evangelical Church Diet.

-whoever raises the article of the holy majesty of God to a fundamental article makes Law out of the Gospel again, and pursues a doctrine of despair.

14. If the doctrine of justification, as well as the doctrine of the sacraments, has each, in its particularity, come to a settled conclusion, then what is at issue in the present development of doctrine is the mutual integration and interpenetration of the two into a unity within the full doctrine of subjective salvation. The crucial point is the significance of the sacraments within the economy of salvation, and the opposing error is a false overstraining of the article of justification. The center of gravity of the development of doctrine has shifted from the article of justification into the doctrine of the sacraments, and in particular into the significance of the sacraments within the economy of salvation.

Gloss on 14. Whoever teaches thus sets the Lutheran Church on the road to Rome.

The Evangelical Church Diet

did, indeed, at Berlin confess itself to the Augustana of 1530. But that this was merely a word and no deed, that it did not thereby become more Lutheran than it was before, and that, rather, a Lutheran confession in decided expression and churchly definiteness has no proper place upon it — this has just recently shown itself again at Stuttgart, partly in the proceedings concerning missions, partly in the scene with Stahl.

It is the simplest thing in the world that it is not individual Christians, colorless and without churchly character, who carry on missions, but the Church of Christ — that is, the churches, in which that Church has, after all, its place and its manifestation. It is therefore just as simple that each of the various churches carries on missions on the basis of its own particularity, that is, its confession — thus only through those who belong to it and to its confession — so that the mission of our Church is evangelical-Lutheran, and its missionaries Lutherans. This already belongs so entirely to the ABC's of churchly knowledge that it is vexing to waste even one more word on it — worse still, to have to keep hearing the foolish talk, such as occurred at Stuttgart on the occasion of Hoffmann's lecture on missions, to the effect that one need not bring to the heathen the antitheses of Lutheranism against the Reformed, etc. Who among us would ever dream of asserting the contrary? Do we not, in our own land, preach — not ex professo controversial doctrines, but repentance and faith — only, indeed, in that shape and definiteness which accords with the knowledge of our Church, that is, as we are convinced, in its own proper shape — how should that not hold just as much, and even more so, for the mission abroad? So here too we neither may nor can preach repentance and faith in any sort of arbitrary vagueness—