# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1859_S362
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

362 A Comparison of Luther with Arndt and August H. Francke in This Regard, etc.

For although it is men who speak, it is nevertheless not their word, but God's Word; therefore one should firmly believe it and not despise it. When a minister of the church baptizes a child according to Christ's command, you certainly hear a man speaking who, in his own person, is just as much a sinner as you are; but he does it by God's command. Therefore, when he says: I baptize you in the name of the Father, etc., you should hear and receive these same words in no other way than as if God himself had spoken them. So too, when someone forgives your sin in absolution, doubt just as little as if God himself had spoken those words, for there God himself pronounces this judgment over you, that you shall be free from sin. Therefore mark this distinction well, and learn what the forgiveness of sins really is, and how one may become certain of it, and where one should seek and find it — namely, that you should run nowhere else than to the Christian Church alone, which has the Word and the Sacrament. There you shall surely find it, and not in heaven, as the Pharisees here suppose and think, that Christ blasphemes God in forgiving sin, and that no one can forgive sin but God. Guard against this and say instead: God has placed the forgiveness of sins in holy Baptism, in the Lord's Supper, and in the Word; indeed, he has placed it in the mouth of every Christian: when he comforts you and promises you God's grace through the merit of Jesus Christ, you should accept and believe it in no other way than as if Christ himself had promised it to you with his own mouth, as he did here to the man sick of the palsy. Therefore the sectarian spirits and fanatics err very dangerously in tearing the Word of the forgiveness of sins away. One might do this if it were some man's word or some man's water; but here it is God's Word and God's water. Whoever wants to take this away from people, or talk them out of it, takes from them the forgiveness of sins; nothing can help against that. Therefore the Anabaptists and other sects have lost, all at once, the forgiveness of sins, baptism, the sacrament, the Christian Church, and all Christian works, because they throw away the word that they hear from their neighbor and regard it as no more than if some cow had lowed. Now, if God were to speak even through a cow or some other animal, as he once spoke through a she-ass, one should nevertheless not despise his word, but let it stand; why then should one despise it, that men speak it by God's command and order? For even though you hear a man's voice, you nevertheless hear God, and you certainly find the forgiveness of sins therein, if only you receive it with faith."

If one now compares this teaching of Luther's concerning the way and manner of attaining to the forgiveness of sins with Arndt's teaching on this point, it cannot indeed be denied that what Luther says is, in substance, likewise set forth by Arndt; only in Arndt it does not emerge so clearly as the proper main point. In his first sermon on our Gospel, Arndt names six points in answer to the question of how the Lord