# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1861_S87
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Report on Preaching the Right Doctrine of Justification. 87

kind of priestly caste, propagating itself from one priestly lineage to the
next, which hovers high above the Christians.

Through this shameful perversion of the evangelical order of the New
Testament — by the power of the devil of pride at work in the haughty and
domineering priests — the evangelical doctrine of justification is likewise
wounded in the most dangerous way. For according to their doctrine, the
individual poor sinner, and all of them together, do not have the
forgiveness of sins, the spiritual union with Christ, and thereby the
access to, possession of, and enjoyment of all the heavenly and spiritual
goods which the Lord acquired on the cross and imparts through the
Gospel and in the Sacraments to the believers, through faith in Christ
alone by the power of the Gospel. Rather, according to their unscriptural
assertion, the matter stands thus: that poor sinners essentially and
properly become partakers of these treasures and goods only through
them, as a divinely ordained priestly and mediatorial estate between
Christ and sinners, and that without them there is no access to these
gifts of God. Accordingly, then, faith in Christ alone is not sufficient
finally to be saved, but rather union with the rightly-believing pastoral
office, through whose ministry it also comes to pass — for that is
where their false premise consistently leads in the end — that the
Gospel and the Sacraments are powerful and effective. And that is
indeed the very same doctrine which the Roman Antichrist, with his
crowd of shaven and anointed mass-priests, also asserts, and thereby
sets up and carries out so hideous a tyranny over the consciences of
Christians. So such lying Lutheran teachers, as for example Pastor
Grabau and his following within and outside the Buffalo Synod, are
nothing other than, in part, a copy of the Judaizing false teachers of the
apostles' time, who here and there, especially in the congregations of
Galatia, threw the souls of the disciples into confusion by teaching that
it was not enough for them to believe in Christ by the power of the
Gospel, but that they must also be circumcised and keep the Law of
Moses; and in part, helpers and co-workers of the soul-murdering Pope
within the Lutheran Church.

Finally, in connection with this false, unevangelical, and un-Lutheran
doctrine of the Church and the preaching office, the pure Lutheran
doctrine of justifying faith is further damaged and corrupted by the
Judaizing and Romanizing doctrine of church government, ecclesiastical
ordinances, and ceremonies.

For the doctrine of the Gospel, and accordingly that of the Lutheran
Church, is this: that the Church — as the congregation of the believers
and saints, considered in part as the totality of all the individual
congregations, in part as each individual local congregation — has the
right and the power, according to God's Word, to govern itself and to
order all its affairs; for God alone, that is, Christ, is the Lord of His
Church, and He wills to rule in it in no other way than from without
through His Word, and from within in the hearts of His people,