# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1908_S12
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

12 Proceedings of the twenty-second convention

every person has his peculiarities. To demand unity in faith, they say, is to put a person in a straitjacket.

This despairing of inner fellowship comes from regarding faith as a work of man. But since it is after all God's work, why should unity of faith be impossible?

Union-making leads to letting even a dead faith count. —

Although only personal faith in Christ brings about fellowship, it would nevertheless be perverse now to separate faith and theology, Gospel and dogma, and to declare theology and dogma unessential. Hence "faith in Christ" includes, for example, faith in the Trinity; Baptism too is not to be excluded. —

It is important to stress that here, in unity in faith in justification, what is meant is not so much the doctrine of justification as rather personal confidence in justification; as the Apology says, forgiveness of sins demands fides specialis. —

When Luther says that confidence in Christ suffices to make a church, he says so in contrast to the Romanists, who also consider unity under the Pope, and the like, necessary.

The Essayist [Referent].

"In this fellowship there stand also those Christians who are found in erring communions." Erring communions we call those communions in which God's Word is still heard, but not pure and clear, rather with an admixture of errors. Such communions are the Roman and the Greek Church, the Reformed Church and the numerous Reformed sects; also the communions calling themselves Lutheran which in fact do not remain with the pure confession of the Church of the Reformation, such as in our time the Ohioans and the Iowans, who deny the "by grace alone" (sola gratia).

To the question how faith in Christ, the Savior of sinners, is possible in erring communions, the answer is: Insofar as they teach errors, faith in Christ is impossible. Errors cannot produce faith, but always only unbelief. The Roman Church in its official confession, in the decrees of the Council of Trent, curses all who want to be saved through faith in Christ without works of their own. The whole great machinery of the papacy is built on the doctrine of works. Whoever therefore believes the official doctrine of the papacy does not believe in Christ, the Savior of sinners, but rejects Him, and is not under grace but under the curse of the Law, as it is written: "As many as are of the works of the Law are under the curse,"