# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1930_S15
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1930. 15

spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that it should be holy and without blemish, Eph. 5:27.

With all the weakness that still clings to individual believers in this life, what the Third Article says therefore remains true: "I believe one holy Christian Church, the communion of saints." And in the Large Catechism we confess with Luther: "But this is the meaning and sum of this addition ['the communion of saints']: I believe that there is a holy little flock and congregation on earth of nothing but saints, under one head, Christ, called together by the Holy Spirit in one faith, mind and understanding, with manifold gifts, yet united in love, without sects and schism. Of the same I also am a part and member, a partaker and co-sharer of all the goods it has, brought thither and incorporated by the Holy Spirit through this, that I have heard and still hear God's Word, which is the beginning of entering in. For formerly, before we had come to it, we were altogether of the devil, as those who knew nothing of God and of Christ. So the Holy Spirit remains with the holy congregation or Christendom until the Last Day, through which he gathers us, and uses it to conduct and carry on the Word, through which he works and increases sanctification, that it may grow daily and become strong in faith and its fruits, which he creates." (*Conc. Trigl.*, 690, § 51-53.) These words may serve at once as a transition to the second thesis, in which the outward manifestation of unity in the Spirit in the visible church fellowships is to be treated.

2.

This inner unity is, according to God's will, to express and exercise itself in complete agreement in all the articles or points of doctrine revealed in Scripture. This includes the recognition of all those who stand on the same scriptural ground with the actual confessors of the truth.

Up to this point we have dealt with the invisible Church and the ideal state of the actual unity of the Spirit found in it, as an essential attribute of the communion of saints. We have seen that this unity actually exists in the fellowship of faith and of the Holy Spirit, that all members of the communion of saints are known before God and marked by their trust in the salvation won through Christ and by the gift of the Holy Spirit who dwells in them. But what already holds in reality of the Church in the proper sense and of its total membership, namely that all members, wherever they may be, unite in faith in the Redeemer before the throne of God in a daily Lord's Prayer, this is also, according to God's will, to hold of the members of the visible church fellowships, of all those who by their confession are Christians and in all points wish to take their reason captive under the obedience of Christ.

In the thesis now before us the question is not so much the personal standing in faith of the individual Christian as a member of the invisible Church (*fides, qua creditur* [the faith by which one believes]) as the confession of faith (*fides, quae creditur* [the faith which is believed]), the outward exercise of the inner unity that is to be assumed according to the confession. It is therefore a matter of a narrower circle. In the visible Church the boundaries that concern associations of whatever kind are drawn more narrowly than in the invisible Church, where the members in reality