# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1922_S15
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1922. 15

and lead a better life, nor what he had accomplished, what sacrifices he had made, and the like, in order to make amends for the sins committed; nor did they set conditions that would have to be fulfilled after obtaining forgiveness. They proclaimed forgiveness without qualification. They proceeded simply from the presupposition that all men are sinners, nothing but sinners, and all lie under the same condemnation, and that for all the justification is at hand and need only be pronounced to them. To natural reason this is once more a mockery of all justice, that one should be saved by simply believing a message.

To the question: "What must I do to be saved?" Jesus' messengers answer: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ," Acts 16:31. Jesus Christ is the bread of life; he is the door to heaven; to him is given all power in heaven and on earth; there is salvation in no other; before him every knee must bow, and every tongue must confess that he is the Lord.

Jesus Christ has taken our sins upon himself. He let our ungodliness be reckoned to him. He felt our guilt in his conscience as if it were his own. He suffered God's wrath, death and condemnation for it. And although God turned his gracious face away from him and God's wrath struck him as burning as it strikes any damned soul in hell, yet even in the darkest hour, the severest trial, he held fast to his Father in childlike faith, thereby made good the unbelief in which the whole human race lies, and in this faith accomplished a righteousness that counts before God. He is the substitute Savior of all the world. Therefore men are directed to him and led to believe in him and through faith in him to be saved.

To the natural understanding, however, the thought of moral substitution stands in irreconcilable opposition to justice. If it is already unjust not to reward a good deed duly, it is the height of injustice to let an innocent man atone for the misdeeds of another. And it is folly, which can lead only to destruction, to hope for the cancelling of one's own guilt from the suffering of another.

This view too of reward and punishment, the idea of retribution, is deeply rooted in the natural man; indeed, it is a part of his nature. He cannot do otherwise, he must hold the spiritual truth of free grace to be folly, and not a harmless absurdity at which one laughs and then, with a regretful shrug, passes to the order of the day; no, he holds it to be a fundamentally subversive error, a lie that undermines, and must undermine, all discipline and order. If in the business of salvation not man's own doing, neither good nor evil,