# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1872_S23
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 23 —

error or factious spirit. And of this article Paul says in particular that a little leaven leavens the whole lump. Therefore he, with such great zeal and earnestness, presses in this article the particulas exclusivas, that is, the words (namely, without law, without works, by grace), by which the works of men are excluded, in order to show how greatly needed it is that in this article, alongside pure doctrine, the antithesis, that is, all counter-doctrine, be thereby separated, set aside and rejected." — Only then does the struggle against false doctrine acquire practical meaning for the individual Christian, when he sees how through the falsification of other parts this doctrine too cannot remain pure. Luther shows very finely in his writing On the Councils and the Churches that, for example, with the Nestorian-Zwinglian doctrine of the Person of Christ, that of justification cannot possibly remain pure.*) So he shows that the doctrine of justification is in fact destroyed by the godless Reformed doctrine that it was not God who died on the cross but only the man Christ. Let anyone console himself, if he holds to this error, in the distress of death with the blood of a mere man! Nothing gives comfort there except the blood of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, shed for the sins of the world, of which one little drop is worth more than all the money, goods and works of men, indeed more than heaven and earth. And as with this article, so one could show with all the articles that wherever one is attacked, the doctrine of justification is at the same time assailed. This article is also often called articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiæ (the article of the standing and falling church), and it is so. Dr. Luther speaks of it thus: "This is the highest article of our faith. If one now either removes it

*) "We Christians," he writes, "must know this: if God is not also in the scale and gives it weight, then we sink to the bottom with our dish. I mean it thus: if it should not be said: God died for us, but only a man, then we are lost. But if God's death and God dead lie in the scale-dish, then He sinks down and we rise up as a light, empty dish." (XVI, 2728.) Similarly Luther writes of the Zwinglian Alloeosis, according to which in Scripture the Godhead is named and the manhood meant: "Beware, beware, I say, of the Alloeosis; it is the devil's mask; for in the end it prepares such a Christ for us as I would not gladly be a Christian after, namely that Christ henceforth is no more and does no more with His suffering and life than any other common saint. For if I believe that only the human nature suffered for me, then Christ is a poor Savior to me; then He Himself probably needs a Savior .. Thither leads him his conceit and the damned Alloeosis, that he separates the Person of Christ and leaves us no other Christ than a mere man, who died for us and redeemed us. What Christian heart can bear to hear or suffer this? For with it the whole Christian faith and the salvation of all the world is altogether taken away and damned. For whoever is redeemed by humanity alone will never be redeemed." (Large Confession [Großes Bekenntniß]. XX, 1180. 1206. f.)