# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1861_S48
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

48 Referat on the Right Preaching of the Doctrine of Justification.

and judgment, which is worked solely through the preaching of the Law, Luke 24:47. Likewise St. Paul commands, 2 Timothy 2:15, that the word of truth, that is, Law and Gospel, be rightly divided. He also testifies, Acts 20, that he kept back nothing from Jews and Gentiles that was profitable, and that he proclaimed and taught both publicly and from house to house, especially "repentance toward God" (which is worked solely through the Law) and "faith in Jesus Christ," which is kindled solely through the Gospel — for only hearts first shattered and broken by the hammer of the Law can afterward be healed by the Gospel. The so-called Moravian congregation or Herrnhuters likewise furnish, for instance, a historical example of how foolish and harmful it is, in the ministry of the divine Word, to leave the Law entirely behind and to drive almost exclusively at the Gospel alone; for through such one-sided and unhealthy teaching, naturally only rich and satisfied people are produced, who cling to this form of teaching in a carnal way and fall into the delusion that it is the right preaching of the divine Word. So it would be just as perverse to go on preaching the Law to terrified, troubled consciences as it would be to proclaim only the Gospel to the natural, secure person.

What then is the right way to preach the Law? Answer: to testify to it as a fixed, certain, divine fact, as the eternal, unchangeable rule and standard of the divine will, showing how man ought inwardly to be constituted and accordingly to do and to refrain from doing. It must therefore be held fast in the preaching of the Law that God is not satisfied with an outward obedience, a legal civic righteousness that counts before men; for the judgment of natural reason argues from works to the man, and sets up the proposition: good works make a good man. Rather, God in his Law demands of every man, with inexorable strictness, the original holiness and righteousness, that is, the divine image, back again — the image which he had created in them in Adam and Eve. "You shall be holy, for I am holy" — thus God speaks in his Law to all men. Likewise God threatens all who do not fulfill this demand of his Law, and who are not themselves truly holy, with temporal judgments and eternal damnation; indeed he pronounces the curse against all who are, even already inwardly, not righteous people, that is, not conformed to his Law, and who accordingly neither are nor remain in all that is written in the book of the Law, that they should do it. Through such demanding, threatening, and cursing of the Law, the natural knowledge of sin, arising from the judgment of conscience and according to the pronouncement of the Law written in the heart, is now considerably sharpened, broadened, and deepened. Man now recognizes not only his individual actual sins, that is, his manifold transgression and neglect of all Ten Commandments, but also, deep and grievous in soul and body, the sin inherited and passed down from Adam