# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1862_S364
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

364 Is Doctrine or Life More Important for the Well-Being and Salvation of the Church?

character, nor fall into any distracting private hobbies, nor ever lapse, in
their teaching and rearing, into a dead mechanism of business and
inherited routine, nor make themselves equal to the world's hirelings and
belly-servants, but rather let themselves be content with what there is,
and cast their cares upon the Lord. Yes, truly, only in this way can it
happen that they, in faith, through God's Word, tread all these temptations
underfoot, persevere in unshaken faithfulness to the end, and with
comforted hearts and cheerful courage await the joy-filled day when the
Lord will also say to each one of them: "Well done, good and faithful
servant, you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much,
enter into the joy of your Lord."

(Conclusion to follow.)

(Submitted by Conr. G. Schick.)

Is Doctrine or Life More Important for the Well-Being
and Salvation of the Church?

Among the opinions that spring from, and are borne along by, the spirit
of the age within Christendom belongs quite especially also this one: that
it does not matter what a man believes, but that before God and the
Church only his conduct toward his Lord in heaven and his neighbor on
earth has significance. One thinks: if only Christians are united in love to
Christ and the brethren, if they only join together for the spreading of the
kingdom of God and for works of mercy, then it is a matter of indifference
what confession they hold and what theological opinions they share. One
holds life, which the Holy Spirit works in faith, to be the principle that
unites and preserves the Church, and therefore declares the purity and
scripturalness of that life to be Christendom's most important pursuit;
doctrine, however — which, after all, only when it is pure and unadulterated,
creates as the sole instrument of the Holy Spirit a right life of faith in
the heart — is regarded as not so important that one would consider it
necessary to watch over its purity and scripturalness. One believes, rather,
that earnest insistence on pure doctrine is dangerous and ruinous for the
Church, since, as a result of it, strife and division can all too easily arise
from the diversity of human opinions. And so, in theory and in practice,
pure doctrine, the unadulterated Gospel, the Word of the living God on
which the salvation of the world depends, counts for less than the outward
fraternization and the busy cooperation of a company of people who are,
in themselves, nothing but poor sinners, and who, with all their love and
all their good works, still could not make a single human being blessed or
sustain the Church of Christ for even one moment. Sadly, this unblessed
delusion — which at bottom sets man above his God and Savior — blinds
the spiritual eye of very many Christians today, who nevertheless profess
to hold Scripture alone for the foundation