# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1863_S131
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

—

What Do the Apostles Say, and What Does Christ the Lord Say, About Our Catechism Controversy. 131

wishes and claims, must yield and surrender itself. — Concrete examples
always demonstrate more vividly than general and abstract concepts. Thus
one may perhaps recognize from this in what sense I say, with the Apostle
Paul, that one must take one's reason captive to the obedience of faith.
Reason itself grasps what arouses its contradiction as the content of the
divine Word, but is then overcome and bowed down by a higher power that
meets it in the Word: so that its very assent is not its own doing, not
even in such particular points of doctrine as still stand very far from the
center of the saving faith.

3. The Doctrine of the Office of the Keys and of Confession.

Christ says: I am a physician for the sick! Sinners alone come to him —
those who know and feel that they are sinners. He, who as true God
searches the heart, meets the sighs of penitence with the holy absolution.
To his disciples he thereafter commits the preaching office, with the
word: Whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven them, and so on. That he
has bestowed this comforting power on the whole congregation, and that the
pastors only administer the keys, is not the place here to set forth
further. Suffice it that the office is given to the Church, and that this
office affords great comfort to every sincere heart (to such a one, namely,
its own sin is not unknown). For this reason Luther too, who knew from his
own experience how needful the absolution is for every poor soul, and the
voice of Christ that sounds in it from heaven into the heart, watched as a
faithful servant at the sanctuary that it should remain with the Lutheran
Church. Well known is his valiant word:

"If a thousand upon a thousand worlds
were mine, I would not let the smallest piece
of this confession be taken out of the Church!"

Have the needs of the soul meanwhile become different? Is there no more
sin? Has the sinner any other remedy than that of redemption and
reconciliation with God through Christ? Does faith no longer come through
the Gospel, through the preaching of it "publicly," and through the
dispensing of the word of grace according to need (and this need is always
proper to penitence) also "privately"?

Let no one say that such a confession is a "Catholicizing" practice. From
what is actually, and wrongly, called "Catholic," our private absolution
lacks the papal doctrine of the judicial power of the priest — the
doctrine that, through contrition of heart, through the individual
confession of sins, and through one's own satisfaction, grace is obtained
only conditionally, with a hope dependent upon it. It is likewise false
that our doctrine of the keys ascribes to the pastor a kind of
mediatorial office. He comes into consideration here only insofar as
Christ's word is proclaimed through his ministry — as everyone ought to
know, though he would do better first to inform himself properly on the
matter in the proper quarter, before he dares, by rash pronouncements, to
mislead those who once