# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1861_S51
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Referat on the Right Preaching of the Doctrine of Justification. 51

voluntary, vicarious, and satisfaction-making suffering and death on the tree of the cross, has completely blotted out the guilt of sin of Adam and his children, completely stilled God's wrath against them, and completely redeemed them from the curse of the Law, in that he was made a curse for us, Galatians 3:13.

Whoever, however, preaches otherwise, and in any way mixes in his own suffering and imagined penance with this atoning and expiating work of Christ, as though it were meritorious and satisfactory before God, as though it helped to reconcile God, thereby again denies God's good and gracious counsel and will, and again asserts, contrary to the Gospel, that God in and through Christ has not reconciled the world, and that Christ is not the reconciliation for the sin of the whole world.

Fourth, it is to be testified, summing up, that Christ, through his all-holy, perfect, active and suffering obedience, has acquired and merited the justification of life for all sinners, and that therefore no man can contribute anything to it through his own doing or suffering. Whoever nevertheless asserts such a thing shamefully and disgracefully breaks off a piece of Christ's perfect work of reconciliation and redemption and of Christ's all-sufficient, fully valid merit, and makes of himself his own Christ.

Fifth, it is to be preached that just as God, in his judgment, reckoned all the sins of the whole human race as guilt upon Christ at the tree of the cross and punished him as though he himself were sin itself, so also, in turn, in Christ's resurrection he has absolved the whole human race from the guilt and punishment of sin, so that, in God's judgment, no guilt of sin clings to any man whatsoever, but rather sheer righteousness before God is present, 2 Corinthians 5:21. For this is the meaning of the saying, Romans 4:25: "who was delivered up for our offenses, and was raised again for our justification."

Sixth, it is to be taught that God has set this fixed, certain, divine fact — of the righteousness acquired through Christ, of God's accomplished reconciliation, and of the redemption of the whole human race from the wrath of God, from the compulsion and curse of the Law, from the guilt and punishment of sin, and consequently also from the punishment and dominion of death and from the power of the devil — into the Gospel, and has sealed it through the holy Sacraments, in order thereby to appropriate Christ and his merit, for the forgiveness of sins, personally to each individual.

This doctrine of the means of grace ordained by God must, however, be firmly held to; for it has indeed pleased God to set Christ and his merit, like a jewel into a golden ring, into the Gospel first preached by the prophets and the apostles, so that no one, in the ordinary way, without this golden setting of the ring,