# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1862_S14
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

14 A New Teaching on Baptism.

half of their being which is regenerated, enter the kingdom of God, while having to remain outside with the other half. Accordingly they would get stuck in the narrow gate between door and hinge, unless they are helped along in some extraordinary way from beyond. I cannot possibly assent to such a teaching. If the whole man enters the kingdom of God through baptism (John 3:5; Titus 3:5), then the whole man must also necessarily be regenerated, and the same holds true of the gospel as well.

But the doctrine of justification, too, is sensitively affected by this new teaching. First, however, I must express my heartfelt joy that the esteemed theologian has treated this very doctrine so purely, clearly, and thoroughly. I know of no more recent presentation with which I would wish to compare it, and I call attention to it all the more because the doctrine of justification evidently lies very much prostrate at present and is threatened or burdened with the ban of all sorts of innovations. It will seem all the more striking to some that I bring Thomasius's teaching on regeneration into connection with the doctrine of justification, but it will be seen that I have good reason to do so. According to his own correct presentation, the justified person — to whom, on the ground of the righteousness of Christ, sin is forgiven freely through faith alone — is essentially and truly united with Christ, or with God in Christ, in what is called the mystical union (unio mystica). This union, to be sure, does not as a matter of fact belong to justification itself, for it is the fruit and consequence of it; yet it is so intimately and inseparably bound up with it that it occurs together with, and at the very same moment as, God's justifying verdict. For the believer it is all the more holy and important in that, according to 2 Peter 1:4, it is through this that the most precious and greatest of all promises are granted him — that he becomes a partaker of the divine nature.

Now, in order to see how Thomasius, from this side, touches upon the doctrine of justification, I will set down here, for brevity's sake, how our older dogmaticians — with Thomasius's own approval — describe that mystical union. They say: "Through this, the substance (nature) of the justified and believing, according to body and soul, is truly, essentially, and most exactly united, through word and sacrament, in faith, with the substance of the Holy Trinity and of the flesh of Christ." (Quenstedt.) On this basis I consider myself, I believe, fully entitled to conclude that through the mystical union we are united — both in our natural substrate and in our free personality, that is, according to the whole man — with the whole Christ according to nature and personality, essentially, properly, and naturally. And this happens in justification, at every time that God makes us righteous, through whatever means, whether word or sacrament, even though in different ways. Now whether Christ as the God-man sinks himself also into my natural substrate through the bare word of preaching and justifying faith, or incorporates himself also into my personality through bare baptism, in both cases it is the whole man who, below