# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1872_S65
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 65 —

more to do toward our salvation, therefore faith is necessary; if the righteousness were indeed not by grace, then something else would have to be required for obtaining it, but now that it is by grace, faith is enough, for faith is precisely only an accepting. — When someone promises me something, or undertakes to give me something, what can I do but believe it? Love helps nothing there, reflection helps nothing either, sanctification nothing either; all this does not correspond to the nature of a free gift, that it come into my possession, but only that I accept it. That, however, is just faith. There I hold, truly, this promise God has given to me, to me, to me. A woman in great temptation came to Dr. Luther and said she could not believe that she would be saved; she must be lost. He then had her recite the second article of the Small Catechism and asked whether she could believe that? and when she said yes, he let her go and said: If you believe that, then it is well with you. In fact, whoever can say: "I believe in Jesus Christ . . . who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, from all sins, from death and from the power of the devil," has life and salvation. — By that saying the papistic delusion is also repelled, as though faith were a kind of virtue beside love and hope, and the enthusiast delusion, as though faith, as a change in the heart of man, made him acceptable to God, so that God would have a pleasure in man for the sake of faith. No, it is not faith that gives man worth before God, but Christ, whom faith grasps. It is like a plain ring in which a diamond is set. Whence does it have its high value? It lies not in the ring but in the gem that is set in it. So it is also with faith, which grasps Christ and thereby has a blessed treasure in itself. The Formula of Concord speaks of this thus: "Which goods are set before us in the promise of the holy Gospel by the Holy Spirit, and faith alone is the one means by which we grasp, accept, apply and appropriate them; which is a gift of God by which we rightly know Christ our Redeemer in the Word of the Gospel and trust in Him, that we, solely for the sake of His obedience, out of grace have forgiveness of sins, are held pious and righteous by God the Father, and are eternally saved. . . . . For faith makes righteous not for the reason and on the ground that it is so good a work and fair virtue, but because in the promise of the holy Gospel it grasps and accepts the merit of Christ; for this must be applied and appropriated to us through faith, if we are to be made righteous thereby, so that the righteousness which is imputed out of pure grace to the believers, or to faith, before God, is the obedience, suffering and resurrection of Christ, when He did enough for us to the Law and paid for our sin. — Such righteousness