# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1861_S85
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Report on Preaching the Right Doctrine of Justification. 85

...are to be found. Indeed, some go so far as to maintain that the Lutheran
Church, because it possesses and administers the pure Word and Sacrament,
is the one holy Christian Church. Now it is indeed true that the Church —
the congregation of the saints, which alone is spiritually united with Christ
through faith and, already in this life, according to Ephesians 2, set
together with Him in the heavenly places — also becomes manifest and
recognizable outwardly. "I believe, therefore I speak" — thus the whole
Church testifies with Psalm 116. And so it becomes, as the pillar and
ground of the truth, manifest and recognizable through the pure and
unadulterated preaching of the divine Word and through the administration
of the holy Sacraments according to Christ's institution.

It is likewise true that every human being who would be saved must hear
the saving Gospel of Christ which the Church preaches; but he becomes a
living member of the Church, this spiritual body of Christ, not at all
through his outward attachment to the visible throng that gathers around
this preaching of the Word, but solely and exclusively through the true,
living faith in Christ which the Holy Spirit kindles in him through the
hearing of the Gospel, and thereby unites him spiritually with Christ and
His congregation. Whoever denies this teaches falsely and speaks foolishly
and blasphemously; for he puts in Christ's place the visible throng of
hearers together with the ecclesiastical teaching office, and in faith's
place the outward attachment to this assembly and to the pastoral office
found within it — just as the Roman-papist Church, in its own way, teaches
this very same doctrine, except that it sets the Pope in the pastoral
office's place. But whoever goes so far as to maintain that the Lutheran
Church — which, in truth, is only one orthodox particular church — is the
one holy Christian Church, commits a twofold sin. First, he thereby
excludes from this Church, and so also from communion with Christ and
from salvation, those who outside the Lutheran Church have somehow, through
hearing the Gospel, come to true faith in Christ. And here it makes no
difference at all whether they heard the testimony of Christ's person and
work through the ministry of a preacher who, building on this foundation,
still piles up wood, hay, and stubble (1 Corinthians 3) — that is, foreign,
old, or new doctrines of men — and that too in the midst of a corrupted
church which, along with this truth, has also taken up these errors, as
have the churches of the Pope and of all the enthusiasts who still let
this foundation stand in their body of doctrine; or whether they heard
this testimony of Christ entirely outside the bounds of the Church and of
the ministry of the Word, as, say, penitent Mohammedans hear it from the
mouths of Christian slaves or heathen, through the ministry of a
shipwrecked Christian sailor cast among them.

Second, such ignorant or presumptuous and fanatical Lutheran teachers sin
in this, that by the necessary consequence of their erroneous doctrine
they include all unbelieving Lutherans-in-name-only and hypocrites who are
found in the congregation of the called, into the Church — that is, the
congregation of the believers