# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1872_S66
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 66 —

is set before us by the Holy Spirit through the Gospel and in the sacraments, and applied, appropriated and accepted through faith, whence the believers have reconciliation with God, forgiveness of sins, God's grace, the sonship and inheritance of eternal life." (p. 611, 612.) We are justified through faith is thus a metonymic expression, that is, here the container is named for the thing contained; it is therefore to be said by it: We are justified through Christ, whom faith grasps. As one says, someone is satisfied by eating, and yet it is the food that satisfies him, not the eating, so we say to him who hungers spiritually: If you want to be saved, you must take what the LORD offers you, but the taking does not still his soul, but the grace; so faith without Christ is worth nothing at all and only faith in Christ is what makes righteous. To this comes now yet this, which in more recent times will need still more emphasis, that faith too is a pure gift of grace from God. Man, says the Formula of Concord, behaves in his conversion mere passive [purely passively], that is, only suffering; he does nothing, but something is done to him, and only when dear God has produced faith in us can he begin to cooperate. In more recent times, however, the Iowans have openly stated the doctrine that the final decision in being saved rests in the end with man. They say it is indeed true that man is saved by grace, but when God offers the grace, then man can provisionally have so much grace that he now cooperates and decides for himself. Through grace, namely, man's will is freed so far that he can decide freely for acceptance or rejection of grace, so that man is saved by faithfully using the offered power of grace. We cannot, according to our reason, conclude otherwise than: If some accept the grace and others do not, while all lie in the same impotence and guilt, then it must be because the former are better, since they decide for acceptance of the goods. But God's Word declares that damnation comes upon the man through the fault of the man who hardens himself, but that faith is a free gift of grace from God, whereby man appropriates the righteousness of Christ.

Thesis 10: "Faith in Christ therefore makes righteous and saved, not because, as a distinguished work of man, it would earn so surpassing a merit with God, and as satisfaction for sin would reconcile God with men, but because on man's side it is the receiving hand, which truly grasps and accepts the treasure of the merit of Christ and thus of forgiveness, righteousness and salvation, which is offered and given in the promise of grace. Faith also does not make righteous and saved before God because God, out of free grace and love, would be willing to regard it as a meritorious work of righteousness