# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1930_S16
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

16 Proceedings of the thirty-second convention

reality known to God alone. The LORD of the Church commands Christians to exercise the inner unity in the Spirit, but he prescribes quite exactly in what manner this is to be done. Love is to rule in the Church, but by this is not meant a feeble sentimentality that operates without true unity, without inner harmony, that even serves as a cloak when the fundamental truths of salvation are denied, but the Christian quality that, as the Apostle expresses it, speaks the truth in love (ἀληθεύοντες ἐν ἀγάπῃ), Eph. 4:15. All Christians, not only the teachers but also the hearers, are to confess and defend the truth, the Christian truth, whose content in a word is Christ, both in order to help the truth to its right and in order to serve one another with the testimony of the truth.

Therefore our thesis says that the inner unity present according to confession is to exercise and prove itself in complete agreement in all the articles and points of doctrine revealed in Scripture. The question here is not so much the so-called outward marks of the Church by which its presence can be recognized, as the confession of faith, or the doctrine of faith, not so much the minimum knowledge of the individual Christian (Heb. 5:12-6:2; Eph. 4:13-16) as the common confession of a congregation or of a church body. Of the first-mentioned point the Apology indeed speaks in a very interesting manner, in order then to pass at once to the other point: "The same Church also has outward marks by which it is known; namely, where God's Word goes forth purely, where the Sacraments are administered in accordance with it, there is certainly the Church, there are Christians, and the same Church alone is called in Scripture Christ's body. For Christ is its head and sanctifies and strengthens it through his Spirit, . . . so that it remains certainly true that the company and the people who believe truly in Christ here and there in the world from the rising of the sun to its going down are the true Church, who have one Gospel, one Christ, one baptism and Sacraments, are governed by one Holy Spirit, even though they have unlike ceremonies." (*Conc. Trigl.*, 226 ff., § 5, 11.)

We repeat: it is not a question here of the marks of the Church, but of the demands of the LORD of the Church with respect to the exercise of unity in the Spirit. This thought is rightly summarized in the Formula of Concord (Solid Declaration; *Conc. Trigl.*, 848, 854): "Since for a thorough, lasting unity in the Church it is necessary above all things that there be a summary, unanimous conception and form in which the general summary doctrine (to which the churches that hold the true Christian religion confess) is drawn together out of God's Word — as the ancient Church always had its certain symbols for such use —, and that such things be based not on private writings but on such books as have been composed, approved and accepted in the name of the churches that confess one doctrine and religion; . . . since also for the preservation of pure doctrine and for thorough, lasting, godly [pleasing to God] unity in the Church it is necessary that not only the pure, wholesome doctrine be rightly set forth, but that also the opponents who teach otherwise be rebuked: . . . so we have also explained ourselves thoroughly and clearly concerning this and about this."

This is spoken in harmony with Scripture. For on what do all the confessions of the orthodox Christian Church rest? On