# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1864_S247
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The First Epistle of St. Paul to Timothy. 247

than in warding off doctrine that is partly false, partly useless. And at
the same time he shows his holy earnestness in punishing the pernicious
false doctrine, by writing to Timothy that Hymenaeus and Alexander have
been excluded from the congregation (cf. 2 Tim. 2:17), so that they might
do penance.

Verses 1–2. In this apostolic greeting the following points are to be
noted:

1) St. Paul expressly emphasizes his apostolic calling even toward
Timothy, his faithful fellow worker in the Gospel. And this happened
partly so that in reading and considering the following letter, it might
always remain impressively and vividly present to Timothy that it was
written by Paul as a servant of Christ directly enlightened by the Holy
Spirit. And the same thing ought also to stand powerfully before our own
souls, we latecomers, especially in the dreadful time in which we live;
for it is indeed clear and evident that the newly-believing, so-called
Lutheran theologians almost without exception deny the verbal inspiration
of Holy Scripture. More on this later.

2) St. Paul calls Timothy in this greeting his "genuine" — that is, his
true or equally-born "son in the faith" — partly because he had begotten
him through the Gospel, according to Acts 16, partly because he was so
very much like him in acting upon and applying the evangelical preaching;
for he testifies in another place that he has no one so entirely of one
mind with him as Timothy, while others of his helpers sought their own
interest, as later proved true also of Demas, who again grew fond of the
world and forsook Paul. God help us Lutheran preachers, that we too might
be genuine and true sons of St. Paul in this: that, like him, with
demonstration of the Spirit and of power, we bear witness — thoroughly and
unceasingly, publicly and particularly — to the evangelical doctrine of
justification, even in the face of faithless work-righteous people. For
that the carnally minded hearers should at first abuse this doctrine in
their hearts to their own ruin does no harm to us, but to them alone. But
to workless hypocrites and to sluggish Christians the doctrine of
sanctification or renewal is to be testified just as resolutely, as St.
Paul does in the closing chapters, so that from the absence of good works
and of the new obedience they may draw the inference that the justifying
faith — that is, the faith that lays hold of Christ — is not present in
them (although they confess it with the mouth), the faith which
afterward proves itself active outwardly in love.

3) Since already in this greeting of St. Paul's every word is inspired
by the Holy Spirit, it is worth noting that in these three pastoral
epistles he inserts, between grace and peace, the additional word mercy,
which does not occur in the other ten epistles to the various
congregations and to Philemon. Now grace and mercy do indeed have a
related meaning, both in their conceptual content and in the object to
which both refer. For both are particular manifestations of the love of
God, and both relate to the