LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1967, Page 57

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THE DOCTRINAL ESSAY
I Believe One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church

Prolog
“Justified by grace” —
is the motto of our meeting.

“Justified by grace” —
is the Good Word of God to a world where the news
is mostly bad.

“Justified by grace” —
is Good News to all men everywhere from God, who
justified the ungodly as a gift, purely out of the
goodness of His own heart.

“Justified by grace” —
is the statement of God’s action in Christ for all who
have sinned and come short of the glory God expects
of them, being justified freely by His grace through
the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.

“Justified by grace” —
cost the lifeblood of the Son of God, whom God set
forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood,
that God might be just and still be the Justifier of
everyone who believes in Jesus.

“Justified by grace” —
is God’s action in Christ by which the church is born,
lives, and grows throughout the world — the church
of which we say and confess in the Nicene Creed:
“I Believe One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic
Church.”

The church, one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, lives
and breathes by the Gospel, summed up in this one

promise with all the authority of God’s own Word to
authenticate and proclaim it: “Justified by grace.”

One

The church is one. The church of God, who is always
God in Christ, is always one. There are not many
churches, nor even twin churches, but one church. The
church has one Shepherd, who has one fold (John 10:
16). There is “one universal Church, scattered over the
whole globe, which is expressly called ‘one fold, mia
poimne (John 10:16), and is guaranteed a sure and
abiding existence to the end of time by the divine prom-
ise (Matt. 16:18; Rom. 11:2-5).” (Pieper)

The oneness of the church is not a mere academic
fact, to be disregarded in the practical life of the church.
Indeed, the oneness of the church has given hope to
people caught in the foils of persecution in our own time,
and it has built courage in hearts gone faint in the face
of enormous problems faced by the church itself, both
within and without.

Assembly of People

“Church” is an old Greek word that became a New
Testament term. In apostolic use it meant the same
thing to believers as it did to anybody in the Greek
world of that period — an “assembly of people”; in this
case an assembly of people responding to God’s call
to them in Jesus Christ.

Sensing correctly that Martin Luther’s attack on the
sale of indulgences was really directed at the hierarchi-
cal concept of the church prevalent in Rome at the time,
Sylvester Prierias, Master of the Sacred Palace in Rome,
responded that the church consists representatively of
the cardinals and in reality of the pope himself. Martin
Luther branded this a good deal worse than the things
which had been said by Tetzel, the Dominican purveyor
of indulgences with his vast claims regarding their
validity and power. In Leipzig the next year Martin
Luther drew even closer to the truth and to the nub
of the controversy which has persisted over four and
a half centuries, with his assertion that mistakes have
been made by popes, councils, and synods. What is
more, a simple layman armed with the Scriptures is
mightier than the mightiest pope without the Scriptures.

Vatican I

It must be said that the Second Vatican Council
made a concession on this point in its constitution on
the nature of the church. The second chapter of “De
Ecclesia” talks about the church as the assembly of the
people of God, but it is still ambiguous regarding the
true nature of the church, whose authority is made to
rest by the Vatican document in the collegiality of
bishops acting in concert on the call of the pope. If he
were alive today, Martin Luther would have granted
in all fairness that “De Ecclesia” represents a step in