# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1873_S13
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 13 —

the Apostolic Symbol [Creed] confess. This Church is found not only among the Lutherans; the Lord is not ashamed also to receive others as His children. He has chosen these others from eternity and wills to make them blessed and glorious. He declares Himself to them as their God, their Redeemer and Savior. But that which binds them to Him is nothing other than the justifying and saving faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus in the first thesis we speak of the Church in the proper sense of the word as also found among the Lutherans. The distinction between justifying and dogmatic faith is altogether unjustified here. Scripture itself tells us, Eph. 4, that there is only One faith. This One faith all children of God have, wherever they may be found. A believing child of God in another church party has at bottom no other faith than a believing Lutheran. Though it may be very deficient in knowledge and burdened with error, just as the individual true Lutherans also here and there err and otherwise often sin, yet it has, with justifying faith, in truth implicitly all the articles of the faith. It is the Holy Spirit, after all, who works faith. But He surely never creates anything crippled, a faith lacking even One article, that is, member. If a Reformed person, etc., does not have this One faith worked by the Holy Spirit, then he is simply no believer. We grant, indeed, that something further binds us to believing Lutherans than to a believer outside the Lutheran Church; but this further thing, the confession agreeing in all articles of faith, is after all something outward, although it is not denied that the knowledge and conviction of true Lutherans in this respect presupposes processes within them; and the latter, the real and proper bond that inwardly binds all children of God, is and remains justifying faith: with it is also removed every inner fellowship in the body of Christ. Or does a Lutheran stand, perhaps, with another Lutheran, who certainly has much in common with him that a member of some other church does not share with him, but who only hypocritically holds to the Church, in inner fellowship with him? Certainly not! This shows clearly and distinctly that justifying faith is the only inner bond of fellowship also between Lutheran and Lutheran. The so-called dogmatic faith here can never be designated as such a bond. After all, our seven- or eight-year-old children, too, are rightly called Lutherans by us, although of many a Christian dogma they have as yet no inner awareness, let alone firm conviction. We call the bond of fellowship of faith inner because it is hidden in the heart and manifest only to God, who with it also at all times knows the right understanding of the whole