# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1861_S90
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

90 Report on Preaching the Right Doctrine of Justification.

are forbidden, do not touch the soul's salvation, faith, and conscience,
but in which the Lord has given His people freedom to order and
arrange them as each congregation finds wholesome for Christian
well-being and good peace: there Christ governs His Church, in part
through the Word from without — "Let all things be done decently and
in order," 1 Corinthians 14:40; likewise, "Let all your affairs be done in
love"; further, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" — in part
through the drawing of hearts from within, to be obedient in the power
of faith to these and similar words, and in the ordering of matters of
indifference to let love prevail, yet in such a way that nothing, nearer
or farther off, is against faith and the confession; for Christians, as
such, are not to and will not give room to the flesh through their
freedom, but are to serve one another through love, each preferring the
other with honor, and no one, in a fleshly manner, looking to what is
his own, but, in a Christian manner, to what belongs to his neighbor,
and all of them in this seeking, each with the gift he has received —
be it knowledge, or wisdom, or experience, or practical skill, or money
and goods — "the common good." In this domain of Christian liberty,
then, in which Christ governs His congregation through His Word
according to love, His servants and those of the congregation have
nothing to command or ordain, nor thereby to bind the consciences of
their Christianly-free brothers to obedience. Rather, in the
(representative) congregational assemblies, they have essentially and
properly only to bring forward the Word of Christ — in part to make
room and standing among their brothers for the love guided by wisdom
in its wholesome ordering, abolishing, altering, and improving of
things; in part, from time to time, to resist the flesh of individuals
breaking out in self-will, anger, contentiousness, pride, greed, party
spirit, and the like, and to strike the lazy, sluggish flesh in others with
the Law, the rod of woe, but to stir up and strengthen the new man
through the Gospel.

Of this evangelical church government of Christ through His Word,
even in the mouth of His servants, the hierarchically minded teachers,
even within the bounds of the Lutheran Church, will either know
nothing at all or at least practice nothing. And yet it is only under
such a government that the evangelical doctrine of justification
remains uninjured — indeed, it lies wholly and entirely at its
foundation, as has already been shown throughout.

Conversely, on the other hand, wherever the legalistic-Jewish-papist
doctrine of the Church and the preaching office asserts itself, there too
is found the church government belonging to it, which, by its very
nature, cannot but likewise undermine and destroy the doctrine of
justifying faith.

For according to this doctrine of church government, the churchmen,
that is, the church lords, either crudely arrogate to themselves the
authority over the people of God — freed through faith in Christ from
the constraint of the Law —