# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1872_S59
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 59 —

penitent: Consider what you are; if you do not recognize all your sins, if you do not have such and such a degree of contrition over them, you get no absolution; but one should say thus: I absolve you now, thereby the forgiveness of all your sins is given to you; you are therefore an accursed man if you do not believe it. Therefore it is so great a sin to go to confession and yet not believe the word of absolution. Even if I were the greatest sinner, I should nevertheless, on pain of God's displeasure, believe this absolution. To be sure, so long as one is a hardened sinner, he cannot believe the word, but then the fault is not to be sought in the absolution not having been efficacious. Because absolution is nothing other than the Gospel, our Fathers also in no way bound themselves to fixed formulas of absolution; whichever they may have used, it always shines forth from them that they wanted to proclaim the Gospel to the sinner and apply it to him.

Two things are especially to be emphasized here: first, that the Gospel is an offer of grace from God, and that on the man's side nothing need be added to make such an offer valid. If one makes the Gospel, in its essence, dependent on the man's believing, then faith has nothing to hold on to. The man must, however, have something that he can believe, otherwise he cannot believe at all; if now the Gospel is not valid unless the man first believes it, what shall he then believe? One is led, as Luther says, to an ape's tail. That is to lead people who are in anguish and have doubt of their salvation into a vise. Quite otherwise teaches our Augsburg Confession, Art. 25: "Whereby we diligently instruct the people how comforting the word of absolution is, how highly and dearly absolution is to be esteemed; for it is not the voice or word of the man present, but God's Word, who forgives sin. For it is spoken in God's stead and by God's command. Of this command and power of the keys, how comforting, how needful it is to terrified consciences, is taught with great diligence; moreover, how God requires us to believe this absolution no less than if God's voice sounded from heaven, and to comfort ourselves joyfully with it, and to know that through such faith we obtain forgiveness of sins." Thus absolution is an object for our faith and not a mere signpost to faith. Always the promise should stand before our eyes, and in it all terrified souls should seek comfort and forgiveness and be raised up by it. If, on the other hand, faith is first to be there, it is made into something quite different from what it really is; it is then no longer a grasping and accepting of the goods that are at hand. The Apology teaches: "But we add the other part of repentance, namely faith in Christ, and say that in such terror the Gospel of Christ should be held before the consciences, in which forgiveness of sins is promised out of grace through