# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1872_S25
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 25 —

make Pharisees, but not Christians. One becomes a Christian solely by this: that it is made evident in the heart through the Holy Spirit that one has been truly redeemed through Christ, has forgiveness of sins, a reconciled heavenly Father, righteousness that avails before God, and can therefore confidently lay oneself on one's deathbed too. Everything else that does not lead a person to this assurance of heart produces hypocrisy and godlessness. Therefore it is not lofty art of human wisdom that is needed to show people the way to heaven, but above all faithful adherence to this article. If only the man who stands in the pulpit keeps this article pure, if only his whole preaching is governed by this thought, that one must be saved through Christ alone: then even if he now and then slipped up in the form or even in the expression, that would do no harm; whereas another, who does not live in this article, may preach, as to form, quite beautifully and correctly, but nevertheless does not bring his congregation to right comfort, to the needed joyfulness. Perhaps he himself and the congregation with him wonder that the fruit will not follow; but certainly this article is lacking. In sum: Where this article is, there certainly is Christ, there are Christians, there is Christ's church; where it is not, there is also no church.

In the second thesis it is pointed out how it was precisely the doctrine of justification from which God began His work of the Reformation through Luther. Luther would never have become the reformer of the church if he had not come to the right knowledge of precisely this article. Before him many lived who also wanted to reform the church, but one notices that they lacked precisely this ground from which alone the church can be reformed, and so they had no success. But it pleased God to let this light dawn on Luther and to lead him on from there to ever greater clarity. He worked in him a despair of his own merit and led him by degrees, partly through the reading of Holy Scripture, partly through the writings of Augustine, to grasp the merit of Christ, and on this road to the recognition of what an infernal darkness prevails in the papacy; how there, in direct opposition to the doctrine of justification through Christ, it is taught that man is to become righteous through the works of the law, and the Gospel is made into a new kind of law. The course God took with Luther emerges from the following passage in his writings: "I had in fact a heartfelt desire and longing to understand St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans properly, and nothing had hindered me in it until now except the single little word justitia Dei (righteousness of God) in the first chapter, verse 17, where Paul says: the righteousness of God is revealed in the Gospel. To this word, "'God's righteousness,'" I was very hostile, and according to the custom and habit of all the teachers I was informed no differently, and