# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1854 12 05_S57
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Der Lutheraner.

"God's Word and Luther's doctrine pass away now and nevermore."

Published by the German Ev. Luth. Synod of Missouri, Ohio and other States

Edited by C. F. W. Walther.

Volume 11.  St. Louis, Mo., December 5, 1854.  No. 8.

Terms: Der Lutheraner appears once every two weeks, at the yearly subscription price of One Dollar for subscribers living at a distance, who are to pay it in advance and bear the postage. – In St. Louis each single number is sold for 5 Cents. Only the letters that contain communications for the paper are to be sent to the Editor; all others, which contain business matters, orders, cancellations, money, etc., are to be sent here under the address Mr. F. W. Barthel, care of C. F. W. Walther, St. Louis, Mo.

On the Doctrine of the Church.

In the "Lutheran Herald" of the 15th of October of this year there is found an exposition of the 7th and 8th Articles of the Augsburg Confession, which articles, as is well known, treat of the Church. How, then, does the "Herald" expound these weighty parts of our churchly confession? It begins quite correctly: "The persons, then, who constitute the Church are the believers." But hardly has it spoken this sentence when it lets itself be met with the objection: "Then only the believers are members of the body of the Lord? Then the other baptized persons stand outside the Church," etc.? And how does the "Herald" now confirm, in the face of this objection, the truth it has itself just stated, taken from the Creed? – Far from replying that the inference is false: what does not belong to the Church cannot be in it, but must be outside it; the unbelieving baptized, although they did not belong to the Church, are nonetheless in the Church – the "Herald," on the contrary, abandons the conviction it had just expressed, that the believers constitute the Church, and now makes the concession: "Indeed, all the baptized belong to the Church of Christ, for the Apostle says expressly: 'As many of you as have been baptized have put on Christ.' (Gal. 3, 27.) Therefore we must designate the Church in the widest sense as the totality of those who are 'baptized into one body and made to drink into one Spirit' (1 Cor. 12, 13.), a view which is entirely in accord with our Confession, as perhaps becomes still clearer from the Latin text, where congregatio sanctorum, that is, assembly of the saints, stands, by which, according to New Testament usage, all who are consecrated to Christ, all Christians in general, were understood. We must therefore designate it as one of the errors of the Reformed Church that hypocrites and mouth-Christians are not supposed to belong to the Church."

We think (one will forgive us this expression for the sake of the truth) that this is not to expound the text of the Symbols to the reader, to explain and elucidate it, but to obscure it for him, to pervert it, and to create the most dreadful confusion about it. It is in truth something unheard of among orthodox Lutherans that the "mouth-Christians and hypocrites," "according to New Testament usage," are "saints," who by reason of the baptism formerly received form "one body" with the true Christians and stand in "one Spirit." And when the "Herald" charges the Reformed Church with it as an error that it will not let the hypocrites and mouth-Christians belong to the Church, to the congregatio sanctorum, and when it thereby gives to understand that the Lutheran Church, on the other hand, holds fast the opposite as a jewel of orthodoxy, then we must, in the face of the Lutheran and Reformed Church, disown this, and testify that it is precisely the Lutheran Church which has ever and always held fast that the hypocrites and mouth-Christians do not belong, namely, not to the congregation of the saints, not to the body of Christ, although they are in the Church; but not as members of the body, but as filth in it. It is one thing to say: in a true visible church there may be no hypocrites and mouth-Christians, and the official acts performed by such hypocrites and mouth-Christians are without power and effect – that is indeed the damnable doctrine of some Reformed sects –; and it is another thing to say: the hypocrites and mouth-Christians are indeed in the holy Church, but they do not belong to it – and that is precisely the doctrine of our Church. The "Herald" indeed appeals, in its erroneous exposition, to the Apology, but with great injustice. The Apology does indeed concede to the Papists: "That the hypocrites and the wicked may also be members of the Church in the outward fellowship of the