# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1861_S84
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

Church. For it stands written everywhere, in all the clear passages of Holy Scripture that treat expressly of justification or of the forgiveness of sins, and accordingly the orthodox, that is, the Lutheran Church, believes, confesses, and teaches that this justification is obtained by faith alone — thus neither by any human work of the Law, nor by any divine work of an administered sacrament apart from the faith of the recipient.

Our Lord Christ also testifies to this in the negative, following the words in which he attached the promise to Baptism: "He who believes and is baptized shall be saved." For thereupon he says: "But he who does not believe shall be condemned." In this, however, according to the first and most immediate force of this saying, he testifies that it is not the being deprived of Baptism, but the contempt of Baptism, together with the unbelief that produces such contempt, that condemns a person in God's judgment. Then, too, there lies in these words also this understanding: that it is not the receiving of Baptism in itself, but the faith which it works in little children and strengthens in adults who already believe through the preaching of the Gospel, that is simply necessary for the forgiveness of sins and for eternal life. Moreover, faith does not exist for the sake of Baptism, but Baptism exists for the sake of faith, so that it is not through Baptism, but through faith, that a person lays hold of God's grace and Christ's merit for the forgiveness of sins and eternal blessedness.

A fifth kind of damage, curtailment, and defilement is suffered by the pure Lutheran, that is, evangelical, doctrine, even in this our own time, through the Romanizing and papalizing doctrine of the Church, of the preaching office, and, derivatively, also of church government, church orders, and ecclesiastical ceremonies — a doctrine that is now being raised up and promoted precisely by such Lutheran teachers as give themselves the airs of churchly-minded and confessionally faithful theologians.

As for the doctrine of the Church, then, these false Lutherans, flatly against God's Word and the confession of the Church, deny that the Church is, essentially and properly, nothing other than "the assembly of all believers and saints from the rising of the sun to its setting," and from the house of Adam down to the believers of the last day — that is, an assembly which, on account of the spiritual nature of the faith by which alone individuals are joined as members to Christ their Head and form his spiritual body, is likewise of a spiritual kind and nature, and is therefore invisible to human eyes, laid bare and known only to the all-seeing eye of the Lord, who alone knows those who are his. Against this, they maintain that the Church is, essentially and properly, a visible assembly of people who gather around the orthodox preaching office, that is, the pastoral office, and make use of the sacraments, and that outward membership in this visible body is altogether necessary and required in order to