# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1862_S153
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church-Contemporary History. 153

that the absolution of the minister of the Church is God's forgiveness, they conclude that the old evangelical Lutheran Church teaches, accordingly, a becoming-blessed "without repentance and faith" through the opus operatum of the use of the sacraments, through a mechanical efficacy of the same, as the Papists teach! That is a quite crude misunderstanding. To be sure, the old Lutheran Church, and we with her, teaches that the holy Sacraments, together with Absolution and the Word in general, have a power that is not only significative (signifying) but likewise both collative (imparting) and effective (producing inward spiritual effects); that is to say, that they are both God's hands, which hand over to us the treasures of grace acquired through Christ alone, and, as it were, man's hand, which work, awaken, preserve and strengthen the faith needed to lay hold of these treasures of grace; yet she also teaches that man can resist the workings of these means of grace, and that for one who does not let those effects be produced in himself, Sacrament, Absolution, and Word avail nothing, but serve him only as a savor of death unto death, to his so much heavier judgment. She teaches, in all earnestness, that whoever is not born again through the means of grace cannot see, and shall not see, the kingdom of God; that without a repentance worked by the Holy Spirit, without faith of the heart, there is no blessedness; that Word, Sacrament, and Absolution are not themselves the new birth, are not justification, but are meant to work these — that they are not the grace itself, but the means of grace. That the old Lutheran Church holds so earnestly to the means of grace has its ground, not in wishing thereby to heal men without repentance and faith, as by bodily medicines which one need only take, and which then work even in one's sleep; but rather in her holding so earnestly to this, that the poor sinner becomes righteous and blessed before God by grace, through faith alone, without works, without merit — that is, not by anything he himself does, effects, or merits, but because God offers him everything in the means of grace and works through them. In this sense we are quite content to have our religion called a "sacramental" one. Indeed, to teach blessedness through faith, and yet to deny to the Word and the Sacraments the character of containing and handing over to us the treasures which we are to take and appropriate to ourselves by faith, is a contradiction. To teach blessedness by grace, and yet to want to know nothing of any real means of grace, is a self-deception. If there are no collative organs of grace, then the whole doctrine of the justification of a poor sinner by grace hangs in the air; faith, which is something relative, then lacks its correlate, or the whole doctrine of faith is a pure enthusiasm. — Furthermore, to conclude from the small number of Germans who have here been won by us to the fellowship of the Church that the system is unsound is very rash. This would break the staff also over the "system" of the Savior himself, who likewise won but few through his own personal administration of the public teaching office in Judea and Galilee. Add to this, that there are here several German churches which follow the General Synod's system of salvation. How does it happen, then, that these churches have proved just as unable to bring the remaining 55,000 (not original Lutherans, but Germans of every sort) into the church? Would not the teaching system of the General Synod thereby likewise stand condemned?

Lay Representation. The question, whether the laity should henceforth also receive representation in the General Conference of the Methodist Church here, has of late been discussed within the denomination with great warmth. At the last General Conference the matter was left to be decided by a vote of the people. The Pittsburgh Advocate says that the result of the vote, as reported, was 2393 for and 2124 against lay representation.

The Tendency of Our Time. Of this the Reformed Kirchenzeitung of Chambersburg, of April 10, says quite rightly: "Young Europe and Young America are working toward one goal. State and Church, in their positive foundations, are to fall. Constitution and Bible are to be set aside, and everything is to give way to false humanism, to abstract