# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1862_S369
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Is Doctrine or Life More Important for the Well-Being and Salvation of the Church? 369

sustained, God's Word is precisely the be-all and end-all for the Church.
Where it preaches that Word purely and clearly, there a right life of faith
must also be awakened; where it, forgetting its calling, falsifies or
suppresses that Word, there people will remain in their sin and
damnation and be cast only into the fetters of superstition. Whoever,
therefore, perverts the true relation of doctrine and life, whoever, under
the pretense of having life, despises doctrine or declares it something
subordinate and treats error as a matter of indifference, in truth contends
against life itself as well: for where, indeed, is life to come from if pure
doctrine is gone; where is right faith, with its fruits, to come from, if one
has lost the sole Gospel besides which there is, after all, no other; if one
has cast the life-begetting truth down from its heavenly throne and set it
on the same level as the soul-destroying lie? God the Lord has, once for
all, willed that the Word should be the means by which his grace in
Christ is communicated to the world. It is attainable by no mortal apart
from the Word. To take away the Word's honor therefore means to tear
the scepter out of the hand of the Lord Christ, with which he graciously
rules in his Church; it means to cut off from poor sinners the one way by
which they can escape damnation and attain eternal blessedness. The
Lord Christ is enthroned too high, and our salvation is too dear to us, for
all the old and new assaults on the heavenly dignity of pure doctrine to
make any other impression on us than that of pity for those who dare to
set themselves against their Lord and Creator. And what does setting life
above doctrine mean, other than holding the work of God in man and
through man — which, after all, is life — higher and more important than
the work of God for man, which was accomplished through Christ and is
appropriated to man solely and only through the Word? But if this were
really the case, then God's work in Christ would no longer be the main
thing, but rather that which, even though it follows from the work of
Christ, comes about through God's operation in us and through us — which
would then no longer be solely and only God's work, but also, in part, the
work of us, the holy people. Does this not mean taking from Christ the
honor that belongs to him alone, and giving it to man? Does this not
mean taking the crown from the head of the Son of God and setting it
upon the sinner? And is this not shameful ingratitude toward our precious
Savior, the wanton arrogance of a fallen creature? Does it at last become
plain to you, ye Lutheran Christians, from what spirit this contempt of
pure doctrine really comes?

That this opinion is not from the Spirit who speaks to us in Scripture,
from the Spirit who builds the Church, experience too has already shown
clearly enough. In opposition to the Reformation, that portion of the old
Western Church which held fast to the errors of the papacy and rejected
the pure Gospel has, at the Council of Trent