# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1861_S81
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Report on the Preaching of the Correct Doctrine of Justification. 81

already been justified, and thus all people in him, then faith could not justify, for faith is a hand that does not give, but takes what is already present. But that is precisely why the divine act of the justification of Adam and all his children is put into the Word, and it is, through the preaching of the Gospel — whenever it is proclaimed to a larger or smaller crowd of sinful people — distributed by God to all of them at once, so that every poor sinner may, with joyful confidence of heart, receive it, that is: believe. For the preached Gospel is not a bare announcement that the treasure — that is, justification, or the forgiveness of sins — is to be had and found here or there, but it is, at the very same time, the distribution of the treasure itself; and it must not be withheld even from the coarsest and most abominable sinners — even should they afterward, out of this comforting doctrine, abuse it ever so shamefully for all the more brazen licentiousness of the flesh — that they too have truly and actually been redeemed by Christ, that God is reconciled to them, and that they too, in his judgment, have on God's part been justified in Christ's person. Precisely for this reason, however — so the testimony continues to them — their unbelief, after hearing such an absolution and release from the debtors' prison of the Law and of the evil conscience, is the sin of all sins, because by it they make the merciful and truthful God a liar, despise God's gracious counsel toward them, thrust away from themselves, as it were with clenched fist, the very treasure distributed to them as well, and count themselves unworthy of eternal life.

In sum, when those Pietist work-righteous of the subtler sort say and teach: You are redeemed when and because you believe — they not only confuse, in a great obscurity of understanding, the appropriation of salvation with its acquisition (for faith does indeed belong to the former, but not to the latter), but, in a work-righteous manner, they make faith a cooperating power that first brings about redemption in the individual; indeed, they go further still and finally come to say and maintain that outside of man there is no redemption at all, and in their sermons and books they present the matter as though this redemption of all sinners were not a divine fact already historically accomplished by Christ — which, however, it certainly is, even if no one believed it, that is, held it to be divinely certain and appropriated it savingly to himself.

But our whole present-day Christendom and church life is, as has been said, full of this Pietist, unevangelical — that is, unlutheran — rubbish; and this manner of preaching seems, unfortunately, to be diligently practiced also by most Lutheran preachers who are themselves believing Christians.

By this means, however, the Christ of the Bible is transformed into a Christ of feeling, and the redemptive work of Christ, actually accomplished once for all outside of man, is turned into an inward process and into a work of faith continually renewing itself in each individual. Accordingly, out of the Bible-faith of our fathers there also arises a mere feeling-