Introduction
How can the teachings of the Bible be packed into
a small book like this? Consider that the entire Bible can be summarized in one
word — “Christ.” Consider that its doctrines can be enclosed in the words —
“Law and Gospel,” or the simple words (profound though they be) — “Sin and
Grace.”
You will grow to appreciate the features of this
book that make it so thoroughly Christian, so soundly Scriptural, and so
characteristically Lutheran. It is filled with Bible verses; not just
references, but verses printed out in their entirety. It is clear, for the Holy
Scriptures are clear themselves. It is concise (brief), precise (exact), and
incisive (penetrating) in its presentation. Its conciseness is the fruit of
many years of faithful teaching in sermons, Bible Classes, confirmation classes
(youth and adult), and seminary instruction. Its preciseness can be attributed
to the painstaking study and labors so typical of its author. Its incisiveness
has one cause only — the Word of God, the Sword of the Spirit, is a two-edged
sword.
You will learn the reason that “theological” words
such as “vicarious,” “objective and subjective,” and “imputation” are used, and
how they alone express as accurately as possible the simple, yet deep, truths
which they convey.
You are about to experience sitting at the feet of
a great teacher as his only student, receiving through him, the saving truth
that makes you free. I say, a great teacher, because he himself does not
intrude upon the matters under discussion. The divine truth is laid before you
in a straightforward and unbiased manner. It is instructive, convincing, and
comforting, not because of the manner of presentation, but because of the
matter that is presented. The manner is indeed pleasant, which adds to the
attractiveness, appeal, and usefulness of this little book. Its contents are
orthodox (correct-teaching), which is a commendation to the reader, a tribute
to its author, and is satisfying fulfillment of a need felt by pastors and
teachers who desire an instruction manual, and by maturing Christians who
desire a book for review and comfort. May this little book be found and happily
used to the fulfillment of that need, to the joy of many souls, and to the
ultimate Glory of God.
Sheldon T. Twenge
Ascension of Our Lord, 1978
The Christian Church has not worked out its
teachings by a process of gradual development in the course of time, leading to
several historically justified systems of doctrine, among which we Lutherans
regard that system contained in our distinctive creeds or confessional writings
as preferable to the rest. All that our Confessions teach concerning Christian
doctrine every Christian knows and believes, because it is found clearly
revealed in the Word of the Prophets and Apostles. And that Word, as it is the
means whereby every Christian has been brought to faith, is also the only
source from which he draws the truth upon which his faith rests. Biblical truth
is God-given truth, and Christian faith is God-given faith. And as God is one,
so the truth which He reveals is one, and so the faith which He bestows
receives the one truth which He reveals. All Christians do believe in one true
God, and they believe what He teaches them in His one true Word. Therefore if
all Christians would duly study God’s written Word, truly confess with their
lips the faith of their heart, and avoid all human teachings which conflict
therewith, all Christians would join in the orthodox confession, that is, in
the correct confession of the Biblical truth. The writer prays that this little
book may through its use of God’s Word aid some children of God in making a
clear and heartfelt confession of the full truth of God’s Word.
W. H. McLaughlin
In all ages and in all places
every individual who has ever come to faith in Christ has come to such faith
through the inspired Word of the apostles, and every one who ever shall believe
in Him until the end of time will be brought to faith in no other way. The
Savior tells us so in His high-priestly prayer, John 17:20: “Neither pray I for
these alone, but for them also which shall believe on Me through their Word.”
This being so, no Christian has ever engaged in any “quest for the historical
Jesus” somewhere apart from that apostolic Word which first brought Christ to
him and brought him to Christ, as Jesus Christ said that it should do. He knows
no Christ but the Christ of the Messianic prophecies, of the Gospels, and of
the apostolic Epistles.
Knowing the living and true
Son of God, his Savior, from Scripture alone, it does not and cannot occur to a
Christian, in so far as he is a true believer in Christ, to derive any
Christian doctrine from any other source than the written Word of God, or the
Bible. Therefore also the teaching concerning the nature and characteristics of
Holy Scripture will be sought nowhere else than in Scripture itself. The
Christian will believe what the Bible says concerning itself; and he will not
regard this as “reasoning in a circle” any more than he would regard it as
“reasoning in a circle” to believe that there is a sun in the heavens because
he sees it shining there. By the word of the Gospel in Holy Scripture “God, who
commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to
give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus
Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).
In John 16:13–15 our Lord
directs us to the Holy Spirit, whom He will send from the Father, as the only
authoritative Teacher of all Christian doctrine: “When He, the Spirit of truth,
is come, He will guide you into all truth: for He shall not speak of Himself;
but whatsoever He shall hear, that shall He speak: and He will show you things
to come. He shall glorify Me: for He shall receive of mine and shall show it
unto you. All things that the Father hath are Mine: therefore said I, that He
shall take of Mine, and shall show it unto you.”
This divine Teacher is the
Author of Holy Scripture. The human penmen — prophets, evangelists, and
apostles — did not undertake to write Scripture of their own accord, but were
“moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21), and therefore that which they “spake”
(which includes what they spake in writing: “prophecy of the Scripture,”
v. 20) was from God, whenever they spake by the impulse of the Holy Spirit; He
was the real Author of Scripture.
We call Him the real Author
because His own Word, in 2 Tim.
The emphasis on the Holy
Spirit’s authorship of the words of the Bible, which is brought out by the word
“Scripture” in 2 Tim. 3:16, is even more strongly stressed in 1 Cor. 2:13,
where St. Paul says of his (and the other apostles’) inspired speaking and
writing: “Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom
teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth.”
A Christian, in so far as he
is a Christian, cannot and will not deny “verbal inspiration” when that term is
explained, as in our Catechism (Question 10), to mean “that God the Holy Ghost moved
the holy men to write, and put into their minds, the very thoughts
which they expressed and the very words which they wrote.” For just this
— nothing more and nothing less — is what God’s Word says about itself.
More briefly we may mention
the four chief properties or characteristics of Holy Scripture, which will be
denied by no one who has acknowledged the Bible to be God’s inspired Word,
together with some of the chief proof-passages by which they are established.
That God’s Word carries the divine
authority of God Himself, who cannot lie (Titus 1:2), claiming full assent to
all its teachings as the only infallible and inerrant source and standard of
doctrine, is acknowledged by all Christians, as by those at Thessalonica, to
whom St. Paul writes: “When ye received the Word of God which ye heard of us,
ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God”
(1 Thess. 2:13). Therefore, as it is written in John 10:35: “The Scripture
cannot be broken.”
That the Bible is clear is
sufficiently evident from Psalm 119:105: “Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet, and
a light unto my path.” If anything in Holy Scripture seems obscure to a
Christian he will lay the blame for this not upon God but upon himself,
remembering that not God’s light, but the heart into which it shines, is dark;
the sure word of prophecy being called (in 2 Peter 1:19) “a light that shineth
in a dark place.”
As to the divine effectiveness
of God’s Word to accomplish its purpose in our salvation, we need only refer to
Rom. 1:16: “I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ; for it is the power of
God unto salvation to every one that believeth;” and 2 Tim. 3:15: The
Scriptures “are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in
Christ Jesus.”
The perfection or sufficiency
of the Bible for all the Christian’s spiritual needs is proclaimed in 2 Tim.
3:16, 17, which declares that Scripture “is profitable for doctrine, for
reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God
may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.”
Every Christian experiences
the truth of our Savior’s words (Luke 11:28): “Blessed are they that hear the
Word of God and keep it;” and of His blessed promise: “If ye continue in My
Word, then are ye My disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the
truth shall make you free,” John 8:31, 32.
“We all believe in one true
God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” So we often sing in our orthodox Lutheran
churches. But this statement is not merely a line from a Lutheran hymn; the
hymn itself is a metrical form of an ecumenical (or world wide), catholic (or
universal) creed which all Christians in the world have confessed since the
earliest Christian centuries, which indeed the Christians (or believers in the
promised Messiah) believed and confessed even before God’s Son came in the
flesh, on the basis of the revelation of this doctrine in the Old Testament.
There never has been a child of God, nor ever will be, in whose heart there has
not lived this faith in the Father, who sent His Son to be our Savior, to whom
the Holy Spirit testifies in the Gospel of our salvation, one eternal God in
three coeternal and coequal Persons — and this for the simple reason that, as
Luther puts it so forcibly in his “Battle Hymn of the Reformation:” “There’s
none other God.” Any so-called “god” aside from the Holy Trinity is an idol of
the sinful human imagination and has no real existence. This is the clear
statement of Holy Scripture, which all true Christians receive as God’s own
Word: “Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: he that
acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also” (1 John
Every Christian believes in
one true God, and confesses one only God who is infinite (unlimited), and
beside whom, therefore, there can be no other God: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord
our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (Deut. 6:4, 5). He recognizes in
the false worship with which he is surrounded, not only in heathen lands, but
in so-called “Christian countries” like our own, that “there be that are called
gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many and lords many),” 1
Cor. 8:5; yet he cannot regard any of this false worship as being really
addressed after all to the one true God, because God Himself does not so regard
it. It is God who says: “All the gods of the nations are idols: but the Lord
made the heavens,” Psalm 96:5. It is God who says: “The things which the
Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God,” 1 Cor.
Every Christian believes in
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He finds this triune God (three Persons in one
divine Being) revealed on the very first page of his Bible, where God is said
to create all things through His Word, that Word being explained in the first
chapter of St. John’s Gospel as being in the beginning with God, and as being
Himself God, through whom all things were made, “and without Him was not any
thing made that was made” (John 1:1–3). The same Word, we are told in the
fourteenth verse of this chapter, “was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we
beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of
grace and truth.” That is our Lord Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the
Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin Mary. As for the
Spirit, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, the first chapter of
Genesis tells us that “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” thus
participating in the work of creation. Later in this chapter (v. 26), in
connection with the plan of the Holy Trinity to create man, we are told that
God said: “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness.” Of such
testimonies to the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity the Old Testament
Scriptures are full, so that to give a mere listing of them would exceed the
limits of this summary. One very familiar passage is the Trinitarian
benediction customarily pronounced at the close of our Morning Service, taken
from the Book of Numbers, ch. 6, vv. 24–26.
The New Testament is even more
clear and explicit in identifying the one true God as three distinct, but
inseparable, coeternal and coequal persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. This
manifestation is given in visible and audible form at the baptism of Jesus,
where the Word made flesh stands in the Jordan, the Father speaks from heaven,
proclaiming Him as His beloved Son, in whom He is well pleased, and the Holy
Spirit descends upon Him in the form of a dove (Matt. 3:16, 17). In the
baptismal formula, commanded for the use of His disciples until the end of the
world, our Lord tells them to baptize “in the name of the Father, and of the
Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” Matt. 28:19, thus naming the three Persons of the
one God (“name,” not “names”) in the customary order. In that benediction,
however, which we commonly call the Apostolic Benediction (2 Cor. 13:14), the
order of naming the Father and the Son is reversed, thus showing the complete
equality, the one Essence or Being, of the three Persons: “The grace of the
Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be
with you all.” On this and other passages of Holy Scripture is based the
admirably clear statement of our “Athanasian Creed:” “And in this Trinity none
is before or after other; none is greater or less than another; but the whole
three Persons are coeternal together and coequal, so that in all things, as is
aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshiped.”
Of this faith the concluding sentence of the Athanasian Creed correctly states:
“which except a man believe faithfully and firmly, he cannot be saved.” Please
read this entire Creed, as you will find it on page 53 of your Lutheran
Hymnal.
The personal distinctions within the Holy Trinity are
defined in Holy Scripture as follows: The Father eternally begets the Son, and
the Son is from eternity begotten of the Father (Psalm 2:7; also the many New
Testament passages where Jesus is called the “only-begotten Son of the Father” —
knowingly and intentionally falsified in the RSV, but correctly translated from
the original Greek in our King James Version); the Holy Ghost from eternity
proceeds from the Father and the Son (John 15:26: “Who proceedeth from the
Father;” not, however, from the Father alone but also from the Son, being called
“the Spirit of God’s Son” and “the Spirit of Christ,” Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:9).
We do not wish to anticipate some later chapters of this
book by giving in detail at this place the Scriptural evidence for the Christian
faith in the full and perfect deity of each Person of the Godhead. But we may at
least mention one passage for each Person. While no false teachers, except the
fools who profess to be atheists, deny the Godhead of the Father, yet none
except true Christians even know the Father, for there is no God the Father
except “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 15:6; 2 Cor. 1:3, etc.): “No
man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of
the Father, He hath declared Him,” John 1:18. Every Christian worships Jesus
Christ as true God, equal with the Father: “Christ, who is over all, God blessed
for ever,” Rom. 9:5. (Here the RSV text deliberately mistranslates, giving the
correct rendering of the Greek, in agreement with the KJV, only in a foot-note,
though no other translation is at all admissible). Every Christian worships the
Holy Ghost as true God, equal with the Father and the Son: “Know ye not that ye
are the
The Christian believes that the Holy Trinity “in the
beginning” (when time began) created the heaven and the earth out of nothing.
That which is stated in Heb. 11:3 is an article of faith for every true
Christian: “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word
of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.”
Every Christian receives the first two chapters of Genesis
as the Creator’s own historical account of His own work of creation, and hence
the only authentic history of creation which is or ever will be available to
man. He finds this divine “Natural History” poetically embellished in the divine
poetry of Psalm 104, and divinely confirmed and doctrinally expounded in the
inspired Prologue of St. John’s Gospel (ch. 1:1–14, especially vv. 1–3).
God’s own account of the history of creation, as He gave it
to Moses, clearly reveals the identity of the Creator, the time employed in the
work of creation, and the sequence in which the various types of creatures were
produced by the creative Word. The first topic, the identity of the Creator,
specifically, the truth that the creation is a work of the Holy Trinity as such,
not to be distributed among the three Persons or attributed to one Person only,
has been treated in the third paragraph of the previous chapter of this book, to
which the reader is herewith referred.
The second topic, the chronology of creation, is accurately
described by the Creator as a period of six days, each consisting of evening and
of morning. This is so before the creation of the sun and other heavenly bodies
on the fourth day, as well as after. These are not
“days of God” (compare 2 Peter 3:8), who exists outside of time in an eternal
present, but days of the earth, days of creation.
What we are to think of the millions of years comprised in the so-called
“geological ages” is clear. They are pure fiction, the fabrication of ignorance
which insists on speaking of what it cannot know apart from the revelation which
it refuses to accept.
The third topic, the sequence of the “six days work,” is
outlined in Genesis, chapter one, with a clarity which leaves nothing to be
desired. One of the most notable points in this connection is that briefly
referred to above, namely, that light, as well as the variation of light and
darkness (“the evening and the morning”), existed before those celestial bodies
which we are accustomed to regard as the sole source of the light illuminating
our earth were brought into being. All human theories, therefore, which regard
the earth’s existence as a part of the “solar system” as dependent upon the sun,
especially the absurd fable which represents the earth as a particle thrown off
from the sun and gradually cooling through countless aeons into the terrestrial
globe upon which we dwell, are discredited as having no ground in fact and
entirely unacceptable to Christian faith. Those who imagine that the Scripture
passages, approximately sixty in number, in which the earth is said to stand
still, and the sun and all stars are said to move, may be “interpreted” in such
a way as if really the reverse were the case, we may leave to pursue their
fruitless endeavors alone. The Christian way is simply to accept Holy Scripture
as it reads.
Another exceedingly important point in the sequence of
creative activity on the third, fifth, and sixth days is found in the constantly
recurring phrases: “after his kind,” “after their kind” (Gen. 1:11, 12, 21, 24,
25). These phrases, then, are used of the various forms of vegetable and animal
life upon which God has bestowed the power of reproducing their kind. According
to God’s Word He created each species (to use the scientific term which
corresponds to the Hebrew word translated “kind”) as a
species and capable of reproducing only its own species. Every “scientific”
theory of evolution, which teaches the transition or transmutation of one
species into another, is irreconcilable with God’s Word, and hence with the
Christian faith. That organic evolution is also irreconcilable with the
ascertainable facts of nature has been scientifically proved by Christian
writers with the specific learning requisite for this task; but such
demonstration is beyond the scope of this book, which rests upon Scripture proof
alone. Let us only add that we cannot be satisfied with the compromise of
so-called “theistic evolution,” according to which some writers are willing to
admit that God made the world, but assert that evolution correctly describes the
“process” of His activity. God tells us in Genesis, chapter one, not only that
“God created the heaven and the earth” (verse 1), but also that the “process” or
“method” which He used was not organic evolution but the direct and separate
creation of each species “after his kind.”
The account of the six days work in Genesis 1 and 2 omits
any mention of the foremost invisible creatures of
God, the angels, but Scripture is full of testimonies to their existence,
nature, and activities. Since, however, they are creatures of God (“By Him were
all things created that are in heaven and that are
in earth, visible and invisible,” Col. 1:16), they
cannot have been in existence before the first day of creation, when there was
only the uncreated eternal God, and they must have been created before the end
of the sixth day, since then “the heavens and the earth were finished, and all
the host of them,” Gen. 2:1. The Bible also does not inform us as to the exact
time when a large number of the angels rebelled against God, and “kept not their
first estate, but left their own habitation” (Jude 6). This must have occurred
before the fall of man, since the latter was brought about through the
temptation of Satan. The existence, incurably sinful nature, and hopeless
abandonment of the fallen angels, or devils, under their prince, “that old
serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan” (Rev. 20:2), is all clearly taught in
Holy Scripture. These evil spirits were also created good and holy (Gen. 1:31:
“And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good”); but
they turned themselves from God of their own accord, and became enemies of God
and man.
Nowhere is the lie of organic evolution more disastrous in
its effects than when it is applied (as all
evolutionists do apply it) to the origin of man. The Biblical teaching
concerning the origin of man is crystal clear and sufficiently comprehensive:
“And God said, Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them
have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over
the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth
upon the earth. So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created
He him; male and female created He them” Gen. 1:26, 27. As “God is a Spirit”
(John
As Gen. 1:27, quoted above, shows, this image of God was
imparted both to man and woman in their creation. This spiritual equality,
however, does not rule out a difference in the God-appointed sphere of activity
of the sexes and a God-ordained subjection of the woman to the man, as taught in
1 Tim. 2:11–14 with reference to the very order of creation before the fall as
well as to conditions as they obtain from that sad event on till the end of
time: “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a
woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For
Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being
deceived was in the transgression.”
With this “transgression” we begin the next chapter, which
deals with the subject of “Sin.” Therein we shall perceive the enormous
difference between man as he is born into the world today and man as he was
created.
All who believe in the one true God, and in His only Son,
Jesus Christ, and redemption through His blood, certainly believe the Biblical
doctrine of sin. For none can believe in Christ as Redeemer without believing in
that from which He redeemed us; and there is no knowledge of Jesus the Savior
without the knowledge of sin. Our Lord Himself clearly points out this necessary
connection when He says: “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that
are sick” (Matt.
What is sin? The clearest and briefest definition is given
in 1 John 3:4: “Sin is the transgression of the law.” In the creation God wrote
His Law into man’s heart; and though this natural knowledge of the Law has been
dimmed in consequence of inborn sin (of which you will read more later in this
chapter), it may readily be shown that man daily transgresses also that remnant
of the divine Law to which his conscience bears witness. That we may be left the
more utterly without excuse, God has clearly revealed His Law through Moses,
briefly summarizing it in the Ten Commandments, and causes it to be proclaimed
to us in order to sharpen our knowledge of His just demands and so deepen our
knowledge of sin. Only that which is contrary to God’s holy Law is sin; but
everything which steps beyond the bounds of this Law, in desire, thought, word,
or deed, is sin. “We daily sin much and indeed deserve nothing but punishment.”
(From Luther’s Small Catechism. Explanation of the Fifth Petition).
The Bible, however, not only tells us what sin is, but also
how sin was brought into the world and what a hold it has obtained upon our
nature. The prince of the fallen angels, who “kept not their first estate” (Jude
6), as mentioned in the previous chapter, called the Devil and Satan (Rev.
20:2), seduced our first parents into unbelief and disobedience to God, which
radically ruined their nature, depriving them of their concreated righteousness,
and so also depriving of righteousness the human nature shared with them by all
their descendants, corrupting the stream, as it were, at its source. The devil
made a beginning with sin (1 John 3:8: “The devil sinneth from the beginning”),
and the consenting will of Adam, the father of our race, brought sin into the
world (Rom. 5:12: “By one man sin entered into the world”). The history of the
fall and its immediate consequences is to be read in the third chapter of
Genesis.
Romans 5:12, just quoted, continues: “And death by sin.”
Death, spiritual, temporal, and eternal, is both the immediate and ultimate
consequence of sin. “The wages of sin is death,” Rom.
The immediate and continuing effect of Adam’s sin upon his
descendants is called original or inherited sin. It is the total corruption of
our entire human nature. Psalm 51:5: “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in
sin did my mother conceive me.” John 3:6: “That which is born of the flesh is
flesh.” This total depravity of our whole human nature involves both a
deprivation or loss to human nature as it was originally created and also an
evil inclination or positive evil state and tendency which human nature acquired
in the fall and which inheres in the nature inherited by us all. In the fall man
lost the original righteousness (“image of God”) in which God had created him,
and is thus by nature without true fear, love, and trust in God, destitute of
all righteousness: “I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good
thing,” Rom. 7:18. Positively, man is inclined only to evil: “The imagination of
man’s heart is evil from his youth,” Gen. 8:21. Whatever we desire, think,
speak, or do, of ourselves, by the prompting of our own original nature, is
“only evil continually,” Gen. 6:5. “There is none that doeth good, no, not one,”
Rom.
Looking a little
more deeply into the Biblical teaching concerning original sin, we perceive that
it embraces two things: hereditary guilt, the guilt of the one sin of Adam which
God imputes to all men; and hereditary corruption, which in consequence of the imputation of
Adam’s guilt is transmitted to all his descendants through the natural descent
from the first fallen pair. In short, original sin means that we are both counted guilty of Adam’s sin and inherently corrupt in our own inherited human nature.
The Scripture proof for the first (imputed guilt) is clearly furnished by Rom.
5:18a: “By the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation,” and
Rom. 5:19a: “By one man’s disobedience many were made sinners.” If this imputed guilt should seem harsh to us, let us recall
that it is the correlative of the precious doctrine which lies at the heart of
the way of salvation, the doctrine of the imputed
righteousness of Christ. To perceive this connection between the Scriptural
doctrine of original sin and our blessed hope of forgiveness, life, and
salvation look at Rom. 5:18, 19 in its entirety: “Therefore as by the offense of
one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of
One the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life. For as by one
man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of One shall many
be made righteous.” The Scripture proof for the second (inherited corruption) is
Psalm 51:5: “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive
me,” and John 3:6: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh.” Only this Bible
teaching, which every Christian will and must believe on the basis of God’s
Word, is a factual and realistic description and explanation of human nature as
it actually is. Every system of education and every psychology of human behavior
which fails to recognize these basic truths is utterly unrealistic and woefully
at variance with the facts of experience as well as with the truth of Scripture.
Original sin is
the prolific source of all actual sins. It is the underlying cause of which all
sorts of actual sins are simply the natural result. Actual sins are variously
classified in accordance with Scripture, the most familiar categories under
which they are grouped being expressed by the terms: sins of commission (see
James
The next chapter
deals with the “only hope for sinful mortals:” Saving Grace.
Grace is love. But
this specific term does not denote love bestowed upon an object worthy of such
love and rightly entitled to it, as the love of husband and wife, parent and
child, friend and friend. Grace is love bestowed upon the unworthy.
Specifically, the saving grace of God is His divine forgiving love bestowed upon
poor unworthy sinners. Every Christian believes in this divine grace, for
Christianity is the religion of grace, and Christian faith is trust and
confidence in the saving grace of the triune God.
The Biblical
doctrine of grace presupposes the sinful condition of all men by nature, of
which we spoke in the previous chapter of this book. Being conceived and born in
sin and utterly unable to help themselves out of this condition, all men are in
need of grace. The Law way to salvation is closed to sinful mortals, as we read:
“As many as are of the works of the Law are under the curse” (Gal.
We may now, on the
basis of Scripture testimony, define saving grace as the gracious favor or
forgiving love (forgiveness of sins) which God for Christ’s sake has in His
heart toward all sinful mankind, and which moved Him to do everything that was
necessary in order to save us from sin and Satan, make us His children, and take
us to heaven. This grace is attested in the Gospel and is to be believed by all
men on the authority of the Gospel.
The grace of God,
as we have said, is free grace. We have done and can do nothing to merit it. Yet
God did not bestow it arbitrarily, in such a way as to violate His immutable
justice. Rather did His grace move Him to provide a way to reconcile His own
just anger against sinful men by the vicarious sacrifice of His own Son, so that
without violating His justice He might lay His anger by and give free course to
His grace. “We are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is
in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in
His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past,
through the forbearance of God; to declare, I say, at this time His
righteousness: that He might be just, and the Justifier of him which believeth
in Jesus” (Rom. 3:24–26). Thus God’s grace both provides the Savior and is based
upon the Savior’s work. To imagine a forgiving love of God toward men aside from
“the cost,” as Luther calls it, namely, the sacrifice of Christ on
It is surely
already sufficiently evident that divine grace is not something poured into us and inherent in us,
as the Papists falsely teach, but a gracious disposition in the heart of God. Therefore grace is contrasted with
our works and with everything which is ours. When we say that God bestows His
grace on us we mean that He exercises His forgiving love toward us. Grace agrees
with faith, for it is by faith that we receive God’s grace, that is, believe
that God is gracious to us: “Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by
grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed” (Rom.
Having considered
the central meaning of divine grace, as God’s way of salvation, in contrast to
all humanly contrived work-righteousness, we may now proceed to enumerate the
characteristics of saving grace, as they are enumerated in Holy Scripture:
A. Saving grace is
grace in Christ. As grace is denied when human merit is united with it (
B. Saving grace is
universal grace. We have already said that God’s free grace is as universal as
man’s need for it. It is most important that we hold this truth fast. For if
even one human being were excluded from God’s gracious will of salvation, each
one whose conscience has been aroused by God’s Law to a knowledge of sin would
necessarily conclude that he himself must be that unhappy being; and thus faith
in God’s grace would be impossible. Holy Scripture proves the universality of
God’s saving grace in three classes of texts:
a). Texts which
say that God’s grace extends to all men: Titus 2:11: “For the grace of God that
bringeth salvation to all men, hath appeared” (marginal reading of the KJV). 1
Tim. 2:4: “Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of
the truth.” John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave his only
begotten Son.” 1 John 2:2: “And He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for
ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.”
b). Texts which
say that God’s grace extends to each and every man: 2 Peter 3:9: “The Lord is
not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.”
Ezek. 33:11: “As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of
the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live.”
c). Texts which
say that God’s grace extends also to those who ultimately perish: 2 Peter 2:1:
“Even denying the Lord that bought them, and
bringing upon themselves swift destruction.” Matt. 23:37: “O Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto
thee, how often would I have gathered thy children
together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not.” No soul of man is ever lost because of a
deficiency in God’s grace, but only because of his rejection of the grace which
is meant for him too.
C. Saving grace is
serious and efficacious grace. God has truly set His heart on the conversion of
all men and puts His full power into the means of grace to effect His purpose.
Christ has commanded His church to go into all the world and preach the Gospel
to every creature (Mark
When the Christian
hears or reads or thinks of the universal, serious, and efficacious saving grace
of God in Christ Jesus, his heart must break forth in joyful song:
“By grace! This
ground of our salvation,
As long as God is true,
endures:
What saints have
penned by inspiration,
What God by His own Word
assures,
What all our faith
must rest upon,
Is grace, free grace, through His dear
Son.”
(Cf. Lutheran Hymnal, Hymn 373, stanza 5)
“What think ye of
Christ? whose Son is He?” This most important question is asked by our Lord
Jesus Christ Himself (Matt.
Luther gives this
same answer in his Small Catechism: “I believe that Jesus Christ, true God,
begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin
Mary, is my Lord.” And every Christian of all ages, including the believers who
lived in the days before God’s Son came in the flesh, agrees in this confession
concerning the God-man. David, for instance, not only calls Him Lord, in the One
Hundred Tenth Psalm before quoted, but he also clearly expresses his faith in
the two-fold nature of this Lord, in 2 Samuel 7:19b, as correctly translated
from the Hebrew in Luther’s German Bible: “This is the manner of a Man who is
the Lord Jehovah.”
The blessed season
of Advent and Christmas has its place in the Church Year for the special purpose
of stressing this all-important Bible teaching of the Incarnation, or the coming
of the eternal Son of God into the flesh. Therefore only a Christian knows the
meaning of Christmas. And every Christian who kneels in worship at the manger of
“It is an
altogether false assumption that the Christian Church arrived at the true
knowledge of the Person of Christ only in the course of time, and that before
the ecclesiastical terms were coined this knowledge was lacking. Luther is
perfectly right when he sets forth that the true doctrine of the Person of
Christ was known and believed in Christendom from the very beginning, before any
council passed any resolution, on the basis of the clear
statements of Scripture. All that our Confessions teach concerning the
Person of Christ every Christian knows and believes because it is found clearly
revealed in the Word of the Prophets and Apostles.
“The Christian
believes that there are two natures in Christ, for he reads or hears that the
eternal Son of God became man through the Virgin Mary (Gal. 4:4, 5; John 1:1, 2,
14). He does not doubt the unity of the Person, for he reads in Scripture that
one and the same Jesus presents Himself as the Son of Man and the Son of the
living God (Matt. 16:13–17). He entertains no doubt about the real communion of
natures, for Scripture tells him that the fulness of the Godhead dwells not
beside, but in the human nature of Christ as in its body (Col. 2:9). He
believes, on the testimony of Scripture, that the Lord of Glory was crucified (1
Cor. 2:8) and that this gives to the suffering and death of Christ its value
(Rom.
“The Christian
further believes, on the testimony of Scripture, that to Christ was given, here
in time, according to His human nature, omnipotence, omniscience, etc. (Matt.
28: 18; Matt. 11:27; John 3:34, 35). The thought is foreign to his mind that the
omnipotence, omniscience, etc., of which Scripture speaks, may designate merely
‘finite, great gifts.’ And when Christ promises His Church that He will be with her always even unto the end of the
world (Matt. 28:20), he cannot but think of this Savior as being present, not
without and outside of His human nature, but with and within it, i.e., he
ascribes to Christ also according to His human nature omnipotence, omniscience,
and, equally so, omnipresence.
“And when
Scripture states that the Son of God appeared in the flesh to destroy, through
His activity in the assumed flesh, and through the assumed flesh, the works of
the devil, and to save mankind (1 John 3:8; Heb. 2:14, 15), the Christian
understands this to mean exactly that Christ performs His official acts as
Prophet, Priest, and King not beside, but in and through, the assumed human
nature, i.e., according to both natures.
“He repudiates the
notion that the finite is not capable of the infinite, for Scripture has
convinced him that the Son of God did actually become partaker of flesh and
blood, that therefore the Infinite has been united with the finite into one
Person. This short summary, based on clear Scripture passages, contains the
entire doctrine of Christ’s Person in its farthest reaches — and all of it is
intelligible to every Christian.”
As a clinching
demonstration of the main thesis of this entire book: that Lutheran doctrine is
simply Christian doctrine, which every true Christian, as a Christian, believes,
let me present a quotation from a Christian theologian, who does not belong to
the Lutheran Church but to a denomination which officially disputes against the
doctrine of the Person of Christ presented in our Lutheran Confessions, in which
he shows the vital necessity of just this Biblical doctrine for our faith in
Christ as our Redeemer.
Dr. Alan A.
MacRae, President, Faith Theological Seminary (Bible Presbyterian),
“The second person
of the Trinity entered the womb of a virgin and she conceived a son. The eternal
One took on Himself human flesh. He was God, the infinite One. He was God, the
sinless One. He had no sin of His own which must be dealt with. As man, He could
pay the penalty of sin. As God He had the power to make this payment. Through
the miracle of the Virgin Birth the God-man came into existence, and only thus
could we be saved. All that we need for salvation is simple faith in the
atonement of Christ. He, the sinless One, died for our sins. But if we are truly
saved, we will go on to become true servants of God, and to do this we must
understand something of the infinite mystery of the Incarnation. Only through
the Virgin Birth could the power of the infinite God be made available to man in
his dire need. The Virgin Birth is vital to belief in a Christ who is capable of
being our Redeemer.” The above quotation is Biblical, Lutheran, i.e., Christian,
doctrine.
Every Christian
believes that when the eternal Son of God, “true God, begotten of the Father
from eternity,” came into the flesh, became “true man, born of the Virgin Mary,”
He entered into human flesh not without, divested of, His divine attributes, but
with all His divine attributes intact; for it is written: “In Him dwelleth all
the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9). The fullness of the Godhead does
not exclude but includes omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, etc. Therefore
it will not enter the believing mind to suppose that Christ in His state of
humiliation should have lost possession of anything pertaining to His Godhead,
to His divine nature, much less that He should have laid aside that Godhead as
such. If, as some false teachers have ventured to assert, Christ laid aside His
divine nature when He humbled Himself and reassumed it when He entered His state
of exaltation, then He is not and never was the God-man, and the personal union,
so clearly taught in Scripture, as we saw in the preceding article, would never
have taken place. The Christian position over against such an error is clearly
defined in 1 John 4:2, 3: “Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that
confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit
that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and
this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come;
and even now already is it in the world.”
Whoever believes
“that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh” will therefore not be tempted to
suppose that He abdicated His throne on high when He came on earth to die or
that the Infant born in Bethlehem is other than the Godhead veiled in flesh.
This “veiling,” then, cannot consist in the loss of anything that is essentially
His from eternity, but only in the temporary and voluntary refraining from the
full use through His human nature of those divine attributes which were
communicated to His human nature when the Word was made flesh and dwelt among
us.
In full accordance
with this Scriptural teaching on the Person and States of Christ, we read in two
of the most precisely worded answers in the Explanation of Luther’s Small
Catechism commonly used among us the following definitions: “Christ’s State of
Humiliation consisted in this, that according to His human nature, Christ did not
always and not fully use the divine attributes
communicated to His human nature. Christ’s State of
While all this,
however, may be, and indeed must be, entirely clear to the Christian on the
basis of Holy Writ, there is still a possibility that one may unwittingly
confuse Christ’s humbling Himself with the incarnation itself, since the two
coincide in time. But this confusion would logically lead to a consequence which
no believing Christian would be willing to draw, namely: If Christ’s humbling
Himself consisted in His becoming man, then His exaltation would consist in His
ceasing to be man. This inference would contradict everything that Scripture
says concerning Christ’s coming into the flesh, which produced an eternal union
between the Second Person of the Holy Trinity and our human nature. It is Jesus,
who “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin,” who now
intercedes for us at the throne of the Majesty on high (Heb.
The logical
sequence of incarnation and humiliation is taught most clearly in that great
passage, which more than any other in Scripture teaches us all we need to know
of the States of Christ, Phil. 2:5–11; for there, as in the definitions quoted
from our Catechism, we are told that both humiliation and exaltation took place
in and according to the human nature of Christ, which prior to the incarnation
did not exist. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who,
being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made
Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made
in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself,
and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also
hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a name which is above every name: that at
the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in
earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
“Being in the form
of God” does not refer to the Son’s eternal divine existence before the
incarnation, but it means that when the Son of God was made man, divine
attributes, majesty, and glory were given to the human nature. This “form of
God,” then, He actually possessed throughout His state of humiliation.
Occasionally, as in His miracles, He gave men a glimpse of this form of God, but
as a general rule men who came into casual contact with Him in His earthly life
did not perceive this in Him but regarded Him as an ordinary man like other men,
or at best as a great prophet like one of the prophets of old or a teacher come
from God (Matt. 16:13, 14; John 3:2). The glory which His disciples saw in Him
(John
To speak in detail
of the several acts of Christ’s humiliation: “Conceived by the Holy Ghost; born
of the Virgin Mary; suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead, and
buried;” and of His exaltation: “He descended into hell; the third day He rose
again from the dead; He ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of
God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the
dead” — this would indeed be a delightful task, but it would lead far beyond the
limits to which this brief summary of Christian doctrine has confined itself. We
shall therefore proceed, God willing, to consider in the next chapter of this
book the Office and Work of Christ, especially His Priestly Office, specifically
the Vicarious Atonement, as wrought by His active and passive obedience.
The fundamental doctrine of Biblical Christianity which
forms our topic is usually treated, in more detailed presentations of Christian
doctrine, as a subheading under the general subject of Christ’s three-fold
office: a). His prophetic office, in which He during the days of His flesh by
word and deed proclaimed Himself as the Son of God and the Savior of the world,
and throughout the ages as supreme Prophet stands behind all prophets,
evangelists, and apostles through whom He has revealed Himself, as well as all
preachers of the Gospel who proclaim His truth in its purity in full accord with
inspired Scripture; b). His priestly office, in which He, both priest and
sacrifice, in His active and passive obedience offered Himself without spot to
God as the one atoning sacrifice for the sins of all men (the specific theme of
this present exposition), and still intercedes for us at the throne of grace;
c). and His kingly office, which as kingdom of power extends over all creatures,
as kingdom of grace embraces Christ’s Church militant upon earth, and as kingdom
of glory rules the Church triumphant in heaven, including the holy angels, unto
all eternity.
We now concentrate our attention upon the central act of
the office and work of Christ for our salvation, as sketched above: His
vicarious atonement or substitutionary satisfaction for all sinners, which He
carried out, as our High Priest, in His spotless life and His innocent
sufferings and death for us. We offer first a brief definition of the vicarious
satisfaction, which we shall then analyze into its component parts, as a
convenient frame-work for the grouping of the precious Scripture texts upon
which this central doctrine of our most holy faith is based.
Definition: Vicarious satisfaction
means that Christ vicariously (in the place of man) rendered to God, who was
wroth over the sins of man, a satisfaction which changed His wrath into grace
toward men.
1. The immutable justice of God which pronounces the
sentence of eternal damnation upon all transgressors of His Law, the wrath of
God against sin and sinners. It is only upon the dark background of the wrath of
God (“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” Heb.
“But the deepest stroke that pierced Him
Was the stroke that Justice gave.”
That is also the meaning of Isaiah 53:4–6: “Surely He hath borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem Him
stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was
wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our
iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon
Him; and with His
stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have
gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”
All this came upon Him because “He was numbered with the transgressors” (compare
Mark
2. The willing obedience of Christ in accepting the
obligation in man’s stead both to keep the Law and to bear the punishment the
Law exacts of the transgressors. The three passages of Scripture which
(especially in the original Greek) bring out this substitutionary idea most
clearly are Matt. 20:28 and Mark 10:45 (identical in wording): “Even as the Son
of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many” (literally: “in
the place of many,” “in the stead of many”); also 1 Tim. 2:6: “Who gave Himself
a ransom for all” (literally: “a substitutionary ransom for all”).
As our willing Substitute and Redeemer Christ rendered full
obedience in two respects: a). By doing — by keeping
perfectly for us the Law of God, which we were
obligated to keep but unable to keep; b). By
suffering, by enduring for us the full penalty
of our transgressions, by suffering for us in His infinite Person, as the
God-man, during the days of His flesh and especially in those last bitter hours
upon Calvary, all that we should have suffered throughout eternity in hell. The
very voice of this unimaginable and infinite suffering of the God-man as our
Substitute is heard in His fourth word from the cross: “My God, My God, why hast
Thou forsaken Me?” (Psalm 22:1; Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34).
“Deserted! God could separate from His own essence rather;
And Adam’s sins have swept between the righteous Son
and Father;
Yea, once Immanuel’s orphaned cry His
universe hath shaken,
It went up single, echoless: ‘My
God, I am forsaken!’
It went up from the Holy’s lips,
amid His lost creation,
That of the lost, no son should
use those words of desolation.”
(Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Cowper’s Grave.”)
This is indeed the very suffering of hell itself when He
for our sins is forsaken. And this suffering of which He could say at the end of
those three dread hours of darkness: “It is finished” (John
“Oh, man’s capacity
For spiritual
sorrow, corporal pain!
Who has explored the deepmost of
that sea,
With heavy links of a far-fathoming
chain?
“That melancholy lead,
Let down in
guilty and in innocent hold,
Yea, into childish hands
delivered,
Leaves the sequestered floor unreached,
untold.
“One only has explored
The
deepmost; but He did not die of it.
Not yet, not yet He
died. Man’s human Lord
Touched the extreme; it is not
infinite.
“But over the abyss
Of
God’s capacity for woe He strayed
One hesitating hour; what gulf was this?
Forsaken He went down, and was afraid.”
The Scripture testimony to this willing obedience of our
Savior is fittingly divided, as before mentioned, into two groups of texts:
a). His obedience by doing,
commonly called the active obedience: Matt. 5:17:
“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to
destroy, but to fulfill.” (N.B. “Fulfilling” the Law
means keeping it, obeying the commandments of God.
This we were obligated to do, but could not do because of our sinful corruption.
This Christ, being Himself God, was not obligated to do, but did for us, as our
Substitute). Gal. 4:4, 5: “When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth
His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the
law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.” The eternal Son of God, the Lawgiver, became incarnate, born of a woman, in order
that He might come down under the Law with us, and
in our stead render that perfect obedience to the Law which we were unable to
render.
b). His obedience by suffering,
commonly called the passive obedience: Gal. 3:13:
“Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us:
for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree" (Deut.
3. God lays His anger by. The vicarious satisfaction which
Christ rendered by His active and passive obedience has resulted in appeasing
God’s wrath against men, has set aside God’s judgment of condemnation and put in
its place a judgment of universal justification. God has forgiven all the sins
of all men for the sake of Christ’s substitutional obedience and death, and has
sealed this universal amnesty by raising Him from the dead. As His condemnation
was the penalty for our sins meted out to our Substitute (“the stroke that
Justice gave;” “the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all,” Is. 53:6; “He
was delivered for our offenses”), so when He was justified (from our sins, not
His own, for He had none) by His resurrection from the dead, this was really our
justification, the assurance that God was fully satisfied with the satisfaction
He had rendered for us, that for Christ’s sake our sins are forgiven: Rom. 4:25: “He was delivered for our
offenses, and was raised again for our justification.” Rom.
“He shows to man His treasure
Of
judgment, truth, and righteousness,
His love beyond all measure,
His
yearning pity o‘er distress,
Nor treats us as we merit,
But
lays His anger by.
The humble, contrite spirit
Finds
His compassion nigh;
And high as heaven above us,
As
break from close of day,
So far, since He doth love us,
He
puts our sins away.”
(Lutheran
Hymnal, Hymn 34, stanza 2)
Every Christian
believes that he became one by a gracious act of God, that God made him a
believer, gave him his faith, even as we read, Philippians 1:29: “Unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on Him, but also to suffer for His sake.” No
Christian approaches God as did the Pharisee in the parable with the boast:
“God, I thank Thee, that I am not as other men are” (Luke
What, then, is
conversion? Conversion is the bestowal of faith. God gives us faith, and thereby
converts us. In Acts
The efficient
cause of conversion, the Bestower of faith, is God alone. Man does not
accomplish, but undergoes conversion. The Scripture proof for the truth that God
alone by His almighty grace, without any cooperation whatever on the part of the
man being converted, effects or accomplishes conversion is so abundant and so
clear that our purpose will best be served by a simple listing of the main
passages without comment, and without any further attempt at classification than
merely to distinguish the proofs for the negative (that man can not and does not
accomplish his own conversion or assist in it) and the proofs for the positive
fact that God’s grace alone works conversion in us:
a).
Negative:
John 6:44: “No man
can come to Me, except the Father which hath sent Me draw him.”
1 Cor. 2:14: “The
natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are
foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually
discerned.”
b).
Positive:
Phil. 1:29: “For
unto you it is given ... to believe on Him.”
Eph. 1:19, 20:
“Who believe according to the working of His mighty power, which He wrought in
Christ when He raised Him from the dead.”
Col. 2:12: “Ye are
risen with Him through the faith of the operation of God” (i.e., “through the
faith which God wrought” — compare preceding passage), “who hath raised Him from
the dead.”
2 Cor. 4:6: “For
God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our
hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of
Jesus Christ.”
Thus we see that
the working of faith in man’s heart, dead as it is to God by nature (Eph. 2:1,
5), is as mighty a work of God as the raising of Christ from the dead, that the
creation of the light of faith in man’s sin-darkened heart (1 Cor. 2:14) is as
mighty a work of God as His commanding the light to shine out of darkness on the
first day of creation.
The means through
which God effects conversion is the Gospel, the Word of reconciliation, the good
news of the grace of God in Christ Jesus, which produces faith in the
forgiveness of sins that it proclaims. The Law cannot convert, for by the Law is
the knowledge of sin (Rom.
Rom.
John 5:39: “Search
the Scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they
which testify of Me” (Christ).
John 17:20:
“Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on Me
through their Word” (through the Apostolic preaching of the Gospel).
The inner motions
of the heart which go to make up conversion are: a), the terrors of conscience
which arise from the knowledge of sin engendered by the Law (Acts
Conversion
therefore, that is, the creation of faith in the grace of God, takes place in
that moment in which the Holy Ghost, after rousing the terrors of conscience,
kindles a spark of faith in the heart of the sinner, or awakens a desire for the
grace of God in Christ. The preparation for conversion may extend over a longer
or shorter period of time, but not so conversion itself; it always takes place
instantaneously. There is no intermediate state between the state of sin and the
state of grace, between spiritual death and spiritual life, between being in an
unconverted state and being converted. Scripture rules out any such intermediate
state by recognizing only two classes of men, in such passages, for instance, as
John 3:6, 18, 36, and Mark 16:16. Since according to Scripture no such
intermediate state exists, all possibility of man contributing something of his
own toward the blessed result is completely ruled out. The moment there is the
least spark of spiritual life, of longing for grace, of turning toward God, in a
man’s heart, God has already converted him, and that by grace alone, without any
cooperation on man’s part.
Despite the fact,
however, that in every case converting grace works with all the power of divine
omnipotence (see Eph. 1:19; Col. 2:12; 2 Cor. 4:6, above, in positive Scripture
proof for the fact that God’s grace alone works conversion in us), nevertheless
man can still prevent his conversion. In Matt.
Of the mysterious
fact that God’s omnipotence is in this instance resistible, Luther says about
all that may be said in accordance with Scripture in his familiar axiom: God
operating through the means of His Word can be resisted (Matt. 11: 28; 23:37;
compare also Luke 14:18ndash;20), but God working in His unveiled majesty (Matt.
25:32, 33) is irresistible. When Christ shall summon all nations before Him when
He comes in His glory at the last day and shall separate them unto their eternal
destinies none shall say: “I pray thee, have me excused,” nor shall any run away
and hide. We must conclude, then, that God’s converting grace is indeed
omnipotent, but still not irresistible. If any should object that this statement
is illogical, we shall merely reply that a Christian’s standard of judgment with
regard to God and divine things is not human logic but Holy Scripture — and God
forbid that we ever permit our thoughts and speculations to go beyond the Word
of our God!
The “daily
repentance,” which is such a prominent part of our Christian life of
sanctification, as expounded in Luther’s Small Catechism (last two questions on
Baptism, dealing with its significance) is sometimes, not incorrectly, spoken of
as a continuous conversion. It is so spoken of, for instance, in Matt. 18:3. But
Scripture sharply differentiates between conversion in this sense and the
conversion by which an unbeliever is brought to faith.
But also in the
usual sense of conversion, as the transition from unbelief to faith, the
possibility of a re-conversion, a repeated conversion, is clearly taught in
Scripture. On the one hand, Scripture clearly teaches that a true believer may
fall from grace and lose his faith. Luke
A lengthy chapter
could here be added on the synonyms of conversion, but we shall be contented
with merely listing them, with a brief reference to the significance of each,
and a Scripture text in which it is used. Regeneration speaks of conversion as a second birth
more blest, in which those who by nature were children of Adam have been reborn
unto a lively faith as children of God. See 1 John 5:1 and John 1: 12, 13. Quickening or spiritual resurrection speaks of the
conversion of those who by nature were spiritually dead (“dead in trespasses and
sins,” Eph. 2:1) to the spiritual life of faith. See
All that has so
far been said in these nine chapters has been leading up to the central article
of the Christian faith, which shall be treated, God willing, in our next
chapter: “Justification, Objective and Subjective.”
It may appear from
the title in the line above as though this chapter on the “doctrine of the
standing and the falling church,” the most fundamental doctrine of all, were
departing from the principle of avoiding in this book the technical terminology
of theological discussion. We intend, however, no real departure from this
principle, any more than in previous chapters on “The Holy Trinity” and “The
Vicarious Atonement.” While it is true that Holy Scripture does not use the
terms “objective” and “subjective” in its presentation of the doctrine of
justification, it does present this doctrine in some passages as a
non-imputation or forgiveness of the sins of the whole world, pronounced by God
on the basis of Christ’s vicarious atonement, without reference to the faith of
the individual or prior to such faith (as, for instance, 2 Cor. 5:19; Rom. 5:18;
4:25), and in other passages as a non-imputation or forgiveness of the sins of
the individual, grasped by personal faith (as, for instance, Rom. 3:28; 4:5,
16), this Scriptural distinction being then conveniently designated by the terms
objective or universal, and subjective or personal, respectively. We are
accustomed to use the term “objective” concerning truths which are valid apart
from human appropriation or acceptance of them, whereas those same truths are
“subjectively” appropriated when an individual becomes aware of them and applies
them to himself by a believing acceptance of them. There can be no possible
conflict when these terms are applied to the justification of the sinner before
God, as though they indicated “two kinds of justification.” For if the truth of
the justification of all men before God were not objectively valid before its
appropriation by the individual, then there would be no justification for his
believing acceptance to grasp, no basis upon which his personal faith could
rest. We cannot believe something which is to become
true by our believing it, if and when we do believe it; but we can only truly
believe that which is already a fact before we believe it, and thus offers a
firm basis for a well-grounded faith. “Faith” in that which is not a fact, not
objectively true, is not well-grounded faith, but a delusion, “wishful thinking”
or self-deception.
That faith, which,
as we considered in the preceding chapter, is wrought in us by God (Col. 2:12;
Eph.
Once the essential
nature of justification as the non-imputation of sin and the imputation of
Christ’s righteousness is fully understood, we can have no difficulty in
grasping the significance of objective and subjective justification, the one
being the declaration that God has in His heart forgiven all sins of all men on
the basis of Christ's vicarious atonement, which comes to us in the promise of
the Gospel, the other the transmission of the effect of this declaration to all
men in whose heart He works faith to receive and appropriate it. Thus objective
justification may be specifically defined, again, in the words of Dr. Little:
“Objective justification is God’s declaration of amnesty to the world of sinners
on the basis of the vicarious obedience of Christ, by which He secured a perfect
righteousness for all mankind, which God accepted as a reconciliation of the
world to Himself, imputing to mankind the merits of the Redeemer.” (Dr. C. H.
Little in Disputed Doctrines, p. 60, quoted by E. W.
A. Koehler in A Summary of Christian Doctrine, p.
147). The fully adequate Scriptural basis for this definition is found in 2 Cor.
5:19: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their
trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.”
This “Word of reconciliation” is nothing else than the Gospel. It brings to us
the blessed tidings that God is reconciled to us
(all men), that He does not impute trespasses unto the whole world, or, in other
words, forgives all sins of all men in His heart; and this reconciled heart of
God He opens up and declares unto us in the Gospel, the Word of reconciliation.
This is the message which all true ambassadors of God bring to us in God’s name,
for real and genuine Gospel preaching consists in proclaiming to sinners the
fact of the forgiveness, the fact that the world is reconciled unto God. So the
Apostle goes on to tell us in verse 20: “Now then we are ambassadors for Christ,
as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye
reconciled to God.” It is just that simple — the Gospel tells us that God is reconciled to us (objective justification), and
works in us the faith by which we, on our part, are
reconciled to God, or accept His reconciliation and forgiveness (subjective
justification). Precisely the same truth is brought us in Rom. 5:18, 19, which
we have fully considered above. Rom.
We may close our
discussion of objective justification and lead over to the discussion of
subjective justification by a definition which includes both, in the words of
Dr. E. W. A. Koehler (A Summary of Christian
Doctrine, Second Edition, p. 149): “Justification is that forensic”
(judicial) “act of God, by which He, on the basis of the perfect vicarious
atonement wrought by Christ, declared the whole world to be justified in His
sight (objective justification), and transmits and imputes the effect of this
declaration to all whom He brings to faith by the work of the Holy Ghost through
the means of grace (subjective justification).”
Thus the
indispensable prerequisite of justification by faith is objective justification;
for no one can believe that he is justified, or that
his sins are forgiven, unless they actually are
forgiven, and God tells him so in the Gospel promise. As was shown in the
previous chapter, God works faith in the forgiveness of sins through the Gospel,
which is the Word of reconciliation, or the good news that our sins are all
forgiven. And he who believes it has it. This is stated in very simple terms in
Romans 3:24, 28: “Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption
that is in Christ Jesus. . . . Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by
faith without the deeds of the law.” From the wording of these two passages of
Scripture has arisen the convenient formula commonly used in the Church for
purposes of instruction: “We are justified before God, or our sins are forgiven,
by grace, for Christ’s sake, through faith, without the deeds of the Law.” “By
grace” shows the source of our justification in the
gratuitous forgiving love or gracious favor of God toward poor sinners, which
led Him to form the wondrous plan of our salvation. “For Christ’s sake”
indicated the meritorious cause of our justification, since on the basis of
Christ’s vicarious atonement God can remit sins without violating His immutable
justice. “By faith” points to the means whereby we receive and take hold of the
forgiveness of sins offered us in the means of grace, for faith is nothing more
than the hand which receives God’s benefits, and is by no means a matter of our
“doing our part” or fulfilling some stipulation or condition. “Without the deeds
of the Law” rules out every work, merit, or deserving on man’s part, even faith
itself considered as a work of man; for it is not the act of believing but that which we believe, namely, the Gospel promise of
forgiveness for Christ’s sake, which saves us, and thus the function of faith is
purely instrumental and in no way meritorious. A particularly strong and
beautiful passage to prove that God’s judgment of acquittal or justification
depends not at all on any quality or condition in man is Rom. 4:5: “To him that
worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the
ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.” Finally, summing up the
testimony of the passages quoted from St. Paul’s great Epistle to the Romans, we
have this wonderful testimony from his Epistle to the Ephesians (ch. 2, vv. 8,
9): “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is
the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast.”
The doctrine of
justification is the central doctrine of the Christian religion, whereby it
distinguishes itself from all man-made religions whatsoever. That upon which we
have insisted throughout this little book: that all true Christians, and not
only orthodox Lutherans, really accept these doctrines in their hearts, even
though through faulty instruction or other reasons they may not have attained to
a clear expression and confession of them, is supremely true of this doctrine of
justification; for by personal faith in this
teaching of Holy Scripture a man becomes and remains a Christian. Every
Christian who ever lived, is now alive, or will yet be born shares this faith;
and every doctrine of Holy Scripture either leads up to this doctrine of
justification, or is directly involved in it, or flows from it.
We close by
quoting an eloquent paragraph of Dr. Pieper and one of Dr. Luther under the
heading: “All Christians Believe in Justification by Faith:” “There is a great
diversity among Christians. Some are strong in their faith, others weak. Some
have an excellent knowledge of the Christian doctrine, others are woefully
deficient in this respect. There are orthodox Christians and heterodox
Christians. But there is full accord among Christians on the doctrine of
justification. All Christians are at one in believing that God forgives their
sins by grace, for Christ’s sake, without any merit of their own. For it is this
faith that makes the Christian.”
That all
Christians of all ages and all lands are one in the article of justification is
thus set forth by Luther: “The faith that we obtain the forgiveness of sins
solely for Christ’s sake by faith has been the faith of the Fathers and prophets
and all saints from the beginning of the world; and it has been the doctrine and
teaching of Christ and the Apostles, who were commissioned to spread it in all
the world. And it is to this day, and will be to the end, the unanimous
understanding and voice of the whole Christian Church, which always in one mind
and with one accord has confessed and fought for this article, that only in the
name of the Lord Jesus forgiveness of sins is obtained and received. And in this
faith they have been justified before God and saved.”
Most assuredly the
XI. SANCTIFICATION
Sanctification in the wider sense (as used, e.g., in the
heading of the Third Article of the Creed in Luther’s Small Catechism)
comprehends the entire work of the Holy Spirit, by which He leads the sinner
unto eternal life, including the bestowal of faith, justification,
sanctification as the inner transformation of man, perseverance in faith, and
the complete renewal on Judgment Day. In its narrower sense, in which the term
is commonly used, sanctification refers only to that part or phase of the
Spirit’s work by which He incites and directs believers to live a godly life,
that is to say, it designates the internal spiritual transformation of the
believer which follows upon justification. It is in
this sense that the word “sanctification” is used in this chapter.
As the Holy Spirit produces justifying faith in our hearts
through His work of conversion, so also it is the Holy Spirit who produces
holiness of life in us through His work of sanctification. Yet these two works
of the Holy Spirit must be sharply distinguished and regarded in proper sequence
in all our thinking, in order to avoid such confusion as would imperil and even
destroy our Christian faith. Indeed the confounding of justification with
sanctification, or placing sanctification before justification, is the chief
root of error with regard to the way of salvation. Hence it behooves us to give
careful heed to such passages as the following from the sixth chapter of the
Epistle to the Romans, in order that we may clearly grasp the Biblical order and
relation of these two doctrines. In Romans
There is, then, a most essential difference between
sanctification and justification. With regard to justification it is rightly
said: “All our righteousness is outside of us; justification is an action not in man, but with regard to
man.” But sanctification in the narrow sense is in
man, an inherent righteousness of life and works, in
contrast to the imputed righteousness given in
justification.
That sanctification does consist in such an inward moral transformation is shown by those Scripture
passages in which man is described as the object of
sanctification according to his essential parts (body and soul). In 1 Thess.
Thus we have seen that there is an inseparable connection
between justification and sanctification. But that connection is always stated
in such a way as to make it clear that sanctification is the consequence and
effect of justification, never in the reverse order. The so-called
“psychological connection” between justification, which is a judicial act of God
outside of us whereby He graciously for Christ’s sake acquits us and pronounces
us innocent in His sight, and sanctification, which is an inner transformation
of our own hearts and lives, is very easily grasped if we bear in mind that
God’s judgment of acquittal is published in the Gospel, “the word of
reconciliation,” and that the justifying faith, wrought in us by the Holy
Spirit, there grasps it and makes it our own. In this way our apprehension by
faith of God’s great act of love, revealed in the good tidings of salvation,
through Christ, produces in our believing hearts true love for God and the
desire to do His will: “We love Him, because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
Thus “faith worketh by love” (Gal. 5:6). We have already said that the Holy
Spirit works sanctification, as taught in
The cart is placed before the horse by all who make
“ethical” actions of man, human good works or holiness, a prerequisite for
obtaining eternal salvation; whereas, according to Holy Scripture, God’s free
gift of salvation, revealed in the Gospel and accepted by faith, is the cause
and motivation of all works which are good in His sight. The perversion or
reversal of this divine order is correctly explained in the Apology of the
Augsburg Confession, (III, Of Love and the Fulfilling of the Law), paragraph
144, Triglot, p. 197, as being due to the dream of natural human reason that
human works merit remission of sins and justification: “This opinion of the Law
inheres by nature in men’s minds; neither can it be expelled, unless when we are
divinely taught.”
In the proper divine order, however, as revealed in
Scripture, the regenerate and justified child of God does cooperate, howsoever
weakly, yet (according to the new man) willingly, with the Holy Spirit in
sanctification. The Holy Spirit, who without any cooperation whatsoever on our
part converted us, prompts our cooperation in sanctifying us. Conversion is a
purely divine work, instantaneous and not admitting of degrees, in which God
gives life to the spiritually dead; sanctification is a divine work, progressive
in its nature, in which God works in and with those upon whom He has conferred
spiritual life. Thus the question as to who effects sanctification receives a
threefold answer: a). God produces sanctification by His infinite power, as we
see from 1 Thess. 5:23, 24: “The very God of peace
sanctify you wholly.… Faithful is He that calleth you, who also will do it.” b).
The Christian cooperates in sanctification, as we see from 2 Cor. 6:1: “We,
then, as workers together with Him, beseech you also
that ye receive not the grace of God in vain.” c). The working of God and the
working of the new man are not coordinated, but the latter always subordinated
to the former, as we see from 2 Cor. 3:5: “Not that we are sufficient of
ourselves to think anything as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God;” and
John 15:5: “Without Me ye can do nothing.” Therefore our Formula of Concord (Th.
D., II, para. 66, Triglot, p. 907) is careful to warn us: “This is to be
understood in no other way than that the converted man does good to such an
extent and so long as God by His Holy Spirit rules, guides, and leads him, and
that as soon as God would withdraw His gracious hand from him, he could not for
a moment persevere in obedience to God. But if this were understood thus, that
the converted man cooperates with the Holy Ghost in the manner as when two
horses together draw a wagon, this could in no way be conceded without prejudice
to the divine truth.”
We next inquire as to the “inner motions,” or what actually
takes place, in the process of sanctification, both in its negative and positive
aspects. By faith in Christ a “new man” has been born; but in this life the
Christian retains his sinful nature, the “old man.” Sanctification consists in
the putting off of the old man and the putting on of the new man. Eph. 4:22, 24:
“That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man; … and that ye
put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true
holiness.” Col. 3:9, 10: “Seeing that ye have put off the old man with his
deeds; and have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the
image of Him that created him.”
The means by which
sanctification is effected, strictly speaking, is only the Gospel, not the Law.
“The Law is said to be written into the hearts in
sanctification (Jeremiah 31: 33), but the Law is not said to write anything. The writing takes place through the
Gospel alone. By the same means by which alone we
are regenerated, by it also we are renewed. Now we are regenerated by the Gospel alone.
Therefore we are also renewed by the Gospel alone. This does not deny that the
Law renders some service in sanctification” (Carpzov, quoted by Dr. Pieper). The
Law, however, never motivates sanctification, but it serves only in a secondary
and auxiliary capacity — by keeping alive in us the knowledge of sin (Rom.
3:20), for where the knowledge of sin ceases there also faith in the forgiveness
of sins has come to an end; by serving as a guide and rule for a God-pleasing
life, for God can be served only in the works which He has commanded (Matt.
15:9); and by keeping the flesh, which tends to hinder our sanctification, in
subjection (1 Cor. 9:27).
Much discussion has taken place on the necessity of good works. That good works are not
necessary for salvation is evident already from the
fact that salvation precedes any possibility of doing good works, and that we
are justified by grace, for Christ’s sake, through faith, without the works of the Law (cf. Rom. 4:6–8; Eph. 2:8,
9). Also the plea that good works, though not necessary to obtain salvation, are necessary to retain it, or necessary to the preservation of faith,
is contrary to Scripture. While it is true that evil works may destroy faith (1
Tim. 1:18–20; 2 Tim. 2:16–18, etc.), it is not true that good works preserve
faith. On the contrary, good works do not sustain faith, but faith sustains good
works (1 Peter 1:5). However, although good works are not necessary unto
salvation, they certainly are necessary. Who
would dare to assert that what God wills is unnecessary? But “this is the will
of God, even your sanctification” (1 Thess. 4:3). The new man does God’s will
freely and gladly from the heart, but this willingness and freedom from the
coercion of the Law does not in any way detract from his acknowledgment of the
necessity of obedience to God’s command. “And this is His commandment, that we
should … love one another, as He gave us commandment” (1 John
Strive as we may to increase in sanctification, it remains
imperfect in this life. Justification is always
perfect, admitting of no degrees; but sanctification is progressive. Holiness of
life is not the same in all believers; not even in the same person does it
always continue on the same level. The righteousness of faith, which is the
imputed righteousness of Christ, is perfect, but the righteousness of life,
inhering in the believer, is imperfect.
The subject of the quality and quantity of good works,
which necessarily belongs to a complete discussion of sanctification, can (in
order not to exceed the limits of this chapter) be treated here only in outline
form:
1. The quality of
Christian good works is seen particularly in two characteristics:
a). They are done according to the norm of the divine Law
(Matt. 15:9; Mark 7:7).
b). They are done out of a willing spirit, from love to God
and our neighbor (Rom.
2. In comparing the
quality of Christian good works with the so-called “good works” of
unbelievers, we find that the latter are mere “civil righteousness” which has no
value in the spiritual sphere. Hence:
a). Unbelievers, though they “do by nature the things
contained in the Law” (Rom.
b). Good works of Christians, on the other hand, though
deficient both as to conformity with the Law and as to willingness of spirit,
are yet highly praised in Scripture (e.g., Col. 1:4). The reason for this praise
is that Christians continually receive by faith remission also for those sins
which taint their good works (1 John 2:1, 2: “If any man sin, we have an
advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and He is the Propitiation
for our sins”).
3. The quantity of good works according to God’s will
(Gal. 6:9, 10; Titus 3:8, 14; 1 Tim.
The reward promised to the good
works of Christians, both for time and for eternity (1 Tim. 4:8) is strictly a
reward of grace. Dr. Pieper well says: “He who hands in a bill to God on the basis of his works, thereby hands in
his request for dismissal from the
Three special topics in connection with sanctification,
which are well worthy the study and contemplation of all Christians, cannot be
entered upon at this time, namely, the Christian’s cross, the place of prayer in
the Christian life, and that glorious hope of life eternal which gives to the
Christian life on earth its goal and its deepest significance.
Finally, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies
of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto
God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but
be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that
good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God” (Romans 12:1,2).
XII. The Means of Grace
In the last three chapters we have been discussing God’s
way of salvation for men, in particular the doctrines of conversion, of
justification, and of sanctification. In the next three chapters we intend, God
willing, to direct our attention to the means or
instruments which God employs to bring about conversion or the bestowal of
justifying faith, thus making man a believer, and which He also uses to produce
the sanctification of the believer. This we shall discuss first in general, in
this chapter on the means of grace, with special attention to the primary means
of grace, the Gospel, and shall then direct our attention in particular to each
of the two Sacraments, Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Subsequent chapters
on the Church, and the Ministry, through which the means of grace are
administered among men, will be followed, finally, by studies of the Election of
Grace, and the Last Things.
In treating the means of grace we must always bear in mind
the Biblical doctrine of universal objective justification, as taught in 2 Cor.
5:19, for this accomplished justification is the content of the means of grace. God has forgiven all
men’s sins, and by the means of grace He conveys to us this forgiveness. 2 Cor.
5:19: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their
trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the
word of reconciliation.” The last words of this Scripture passage refer to
the means of grace; for the Gospel, or good news that our sins are graciously
forgiven for Christ’s sake, which is the primary means of grace, is that “Word
of reconciliation” referred to in the text just quoted.
The Gospel is a means of grace in every form in which it
reaches men: as preached (Mark 16:15, 16; Luke 24:47: “remission of sins should
be preached in His name among all nations”), as written or printed and read
(John 20:31: “These are written, that ye might believe;” 1 John 1:4: “These
things we write unto you, that your joy may be full”), as declared in
absolution, general or individual (John 20:23: “Whosesoever sins ye remit, they
are remitted unto them”), as pictured in symbols or types (John 3:14, 15: the
brazen serpent in the wilderness), or as pondered in the heart (Rom. 10:8: “The
Word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart”) — also in the holy
Sacraments, as connected with the water of Baptism (Acts 2:38; 22:16) and with
Christ’s true body and blood in the Lord’s Supper (Luke 22:19, 20; Matt.
26:26–28).
All means of grace, the Gospel, Baptism, and the Lord’s
Supper, have the same purpose and the same effect. As surely as Baptism is a
means of regeneration (“the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy
Ghost,” Titus 3:5), so surely the word of the Gospel works regeneration (“being
born again … by the word of God,” 1 Peter
The great importance of the Christian doctrine of the means
of grace is evident from the Scriptural teaching that God wills to bestow the
forgiveness of sins for Christ’s sake and faith in this forgiveness,
regeneration unto spiritual life and all spiritual gifts connected with it, only
through the means of grace which He has ordained, namely, through the Word of
the Gospel and the Sacraments. It is noteworthy that, although many erring
denominations theoretically deny the effectiveness of the means of grace and
teach that God’s grace operates without means, they nevertheless most
inconsistently continue to use these means (or at least some of them), and that
God uses His means of grace, also in their hands and mouths, to bring men to
faith and preserve them in faith, thus producing and maintaining the one true
faith in the hearts of His real Christians in spite of Satan’s delusions. We
need only adduce a few of the many strong statements of Holy Scripture to prove
that God does indeed in His Word emphasize the efficacy and importance of the
means of grace in kindling and sustaining Christian faith:
John 17:20: “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them
also which shall believe on Me through their
Word.”
1 Peter 1:23: “Being born again, not of corruptible seed,
but of incorruptible, by the Word of God, which
liveth and abideth for ever.”
Titus 3:5: “According to His mercy He saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and
renewing of the Holy Ghost.”
Mark 16:15, 16: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved.”
Luke 24:47: “Repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among
all nations.” Notice that this text does not speak of preaching about the remission of sins, but simply preaching remission of sins. The preaching of the
Gospel conveys and bestows the remission of sins. And no remission of sins is to
be found elsewhere than in the Gospel.
Through the means of grace alone God chooses to deal with
us unto our salvation, to bestow His gifts of forgiveness, peace, joy, and
everlasting life. By this we do not mean to say that God could not operate in our hearts without such external
means, nor that He has not in certain exceptional
cases done so (see Luke 1:15, 41, 44). But what we do assert is that when, under
terrors of conscience, we seek assurance of God’s grace, He has bound us to the
objective Word of the Gospel and to the Sacraments, and has not referred us in
this situation to an immediate internal illumination of the Spirit. The Holy
Spirit chooses to work through the means of grace. In them He is at home and at
work; and, knowing this from Holy Scripture, we shall not seek Him and His
gracious operations elsewhere. The Apostolic teaching and practice agrees with
the Scripture testimony cited in the previous paragraph, for they do not
encourage men to expect the Holy Spirit to light on them without means, but
enjoin them to seek grace and salvation in the means of grace:
Acts
Acts
1 Peter 3:21: “Baptism doth
also now save us.”
Thus Holy Scripture teaches both that faith and
regeneration are the work of divine omnipotence and that this divine power is
exerted through the outward means of the Word and Baptism.
If we are clear on the Scriptural doctrines of universal
objective justification and the means of grace, we shall have no difficulty with
the Scriptural teaching concerning the means of grace in the form of absolution, as we find it in the words of our Lord
recorded in John 20:23: “Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto
them.” For absolution is simply a special form of proclaiming the Gospel, namely, the announcing of the forgiveness of
sins to one or more persons upon their confession of sins, either by a public
servant of the Church or by a lay Christian. Absolution is based solely on the
fact of God’s reconciliation to the world by the perfect satisfaction of Christ
and on the divine command (John
A few words must be added as to the reason why prayer,
deeply as we appreciate the privilege of such access to our heavenly Father,
must not be placed on a level with the Word and the Sacraments as a means of
grace. To regard prayer as a means of grace (as so many do) would be
coordinating incongruous things. Word and Sacrament are the means through which
God deals with us men, that is, imparts to men the remission of sins earned by
Christ, and through this bestowal creates and sustains faith in them. Word and
Sacraments are, as Luther was accustomed to say, something God does to us. By
prayer, on the other hand, believers are doing something toward God. Prayer
obtains the remission of sins as an exercise of faith, which is man’s hand
stretched out to receive God’s benefits, not as a means of grace, which is God’s
hand stretched out to bestow His benefits.
The important Biblical doctrine of the distinction between
Law and Gospel, which has already been virtually treated, under another name, in
the article of justification, should be at least briefly presented also in
connection with the doctrine of the means of grace. For, strictly speaking, not
the Law, but the Gospel alone, is a means of grace. God indeed prepares a man’s
heart for the bestowal of His grace by the Law, just as a farmer prepares the
ground for the sowing of seed by breaking it up with the plow, but He never
bestows the gracious forgiveness by means of the Law. Romans 3:20: “Therefore by
the deeds of the Law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight: for by the
Law is the knowledge of sin.” The Law, in the proper sense of the word, is that
Word of God in which God demands of men that in their nature, thoughts, words,
and acts they conform to the standard of His commandments, and pronounces the
curse on those who fail to comply. The Gospel, in the proper sense of the word,
is that Word of God in which God promises His grace for the sake of Christ’s
vicarious satisfaction to such as have not kept the divine Law. Law and Gospel
have indeed something in common — both are the Word of God; both apply to all
men; and both are to be taught side by side in the Church and by the Church up
to the Last Day.
But as to their promises, as to the persons to whom each is
to be preached, and as to the sources from which they are known, Law and Gospel
are opposites. The Law’s promises are conditional, and therefore beyond our
reach, since we are unable to fulfill the condition (Gal.
(N.B. The above presentation, especially the brief
treatment of the distinction between Law and Gospel, has been in large part
condensed and simplified from Dr. F. Pieper’s masterly presentation in his Christian Dogmatics. The remaining six chapters will
lean heavily upon my translation of unpublished lectures delivered in the German
language by the sainted Dr. Pieper in the fall semester of 1927–28, when I sat
at his feet in his Dogmatics class).
That Baptism is
not a human invention, but a divine ordinance to be observed until the last day,
is plainly taught by Holy Scripture: Matt. 28:19, 20: “Go ye therefore, and make
disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the
Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I
have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the
world;” and also Mark 16:15, 16: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the
Gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but
he that believeth not shall be damned.” Only if we hold fast the truth that
Baptism is a divine ordinance do we recognize that in Baptism, though it is
performed through men, God Himself deals with us.
To a real Baptism
belong, as visible signs, water (Eph.
More important
then the mode of applying the water is that which makes Baptism “not simple
water only” but a Sacrament. That which makes the application of water a means
of grace, a means of the forgiveness of sin, is God’s Word, that is, God’s
command to baptize and the promise of the remission of sins connected therewith;
or, as Luther puts it in his Small Catechism, “Baptism is the water comprehended
in God’s command and connected with God’s Word.” In Eph. 5:25, 26 we read of
Christ that He cleanses the Church “with the washing of water by the Word”
(literally: “in the Word”). God’s Word is, as it were, the container (Luther’s
“comprehended in” means “wrapped up in”), whereby the application of water
becomes a purification from the guilt of sin.
In answer to the
question as to which baptisms performed in other denominations we should
recognize as valid and which we must regard as no baptism, we answer:
Denominations in which the Word of God does not come to the element do not
administer Christian Baptism. That is the case with all Unitarian bodies, since
they deny the Holy Trinity (thus not only making their so-called “baptism”
invalid, but definitely placing themselves outside of the Christian Church), and
Baptism in the name of the triune God belongs to the essence of Baptism, Matt.
28:19: “Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Ghost.” On the other hand, we recognize the Baptism of the Roman Church and
of the Reformed Churches (unless they have succumbed to Unitarianism) as valid,
since they confess the triune God. The errors of these denominations in the
doctrine of Baptism do not concern the essence but the fruit and effect of
Baptism.
We rightly hold
fast to Baptism in the name of the triune God, with the express naming of the
three Persons of the Holy Trinity, since faith in the name of the Father and of
the Son and of the Holy Ghost is that faith whereby the Christian religion is
distinguished from all false religions. On the basis of Scripture we distinguish
between natural and Christian knowledge of God. There is a natural knowledge of
God, namely, that derived from the works of creation (Rom. 1:20) and from the
Law of God which even since the fall is not entirely eradicated out of the heart
of man, Rom. 2:15, 16. But the natural knowledge of God does not go beyond the
knowledge that there is an eternal, almighty, and holy God, who rewards the good
and punishes the evil; and the result of this natural knowledge of God is a bad
conscience, since man becomes aware in his conscience that he has transgressed
the Law of God (Eph. 2:12). The Christian knowledge of God, on the other hand,
which is derived only from the revelation of God in His Word (from the Holy
Scriptures), has as its content the truth that the one true eternal God is
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; and the result of this knowledge is a good
conscience, since Scripture not only teaches that in the one God there are three
Persons, but also that the Father so loved the world that He gave His only
begotten Son to be the Redeemer, that the Son refused not to give His life into
death to cancel the guilt of men, and that it is the office of the Holy Spirit
to work faith in the forgiveness of sins obtained by the Son of God. When we
apply this to Baptism we must say that we have in Baptism in the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost an expression of the faith and
confession whereby the Christian religion is distinguished from all
non-Christian religions. Therefore we hold immovably fast to the Trinitarian
formula of Baptism given in Matt. 28:19.
“Baptism is a
work, not which we offer to God, but in which God baptizes us, i.e., a minister
in the place of God; and God here offers and presents the remission of sins”
(Apology, Triglotta, p. 389, 18). That this statement of our Confession is
Scriptural we see from Acts 2:38 and from the fact that Baptism in the name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost is Baptism in the name of the
God who is gracious to sinners. The same is witnessed by clear Scripture
passages such as the following: Acts 22:16: Ananias says to Saul, whose hands
are stained with the blood of Christians: “Be baptized, and wash away thy sins”
— and this Baptism does, not only in individual cases, but to the whole
Christian Church in general, Eph. 5:25, 26: “Christ loved the Church, and gave
Himself for it; that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water
by the Word.” And as the Word of the Gospel by offering the forgiveness of sins
also works faith and is thereby a means of regeneration (1 Peter
Because Baptism
offers the forgiveness of sins, therefore it is also an instrument of the Holy
Ghost for awakening and strengthening the faith of the Christians (John
What Luther and
the
Baptism is not to
be repeated, but it is to be used throughout the Christian life for comfort (Gal.
Both children and
adults are to be baptized. Infant Baptism was the rule in the Christian Church
from the beginning, since Baptism took the place of the Old Testament sacrament
of circumcision, according to Col. 2:11, 12, where Baptism is called “the
circumcision of Christ.” From this fact it is also clear why infant Baptism,
like other self-evident matters (for instance, the admission of women to the
Lord’s Supper), is not specifically prescribed. But it is implied in the record
concerning the Baptism of whole families (Acts
Pastors administer
Baptism as called public servants of the congregation of believers. But since
all Christians are the original possessors of the sacraments, therefore, in case
of emergency when the services of an orthodox pastor cannot be obtained, lay
Baptism — also by women — is a right and duty. See 1 Cor. 3:21–23. That the
command, Matt. 28:19, 20, concerns not only the Apostles but also the Church of
Christ until the last day, is evident from v. 20b: “Lo, I am with you alway,
even unto the end of the world.”
As to the
necessity of Baptism, we must hold that only the contempt of the Sacrament damns
anyone, not the mere lack or deprivation of it. This is so, because also through
merely hearing and believing the Word of the Gospel, sin is forgiven and
regeneration is effected, Luke 24:47; 1 Peter
A final note on
the Baptism administered by John the Baptist may be added, since some strange
thoughts on this subject are current, as though this Baptism was essentially
different from Christian Baptism. Also John’s Baptism was, according to Mark
1:4, a “Baptism of repentance for the remission of sins” (and thus just like
Christian Baptism, Acts 2:38), a means of the remission of sins and hence also a
means of regeneration, as Christ Himself asserts in John 3:5 (“born of water and
of the Spirit”), for there He is speaking of John’s Baptism. From this fact, it
is evident that John’s Baptism, aside from its preparatory nature in pointing to
a Savior who was immediately to appear rather than one who had finished His
saving work, was essentially equivalent to New Testament Baptism.
XIV. The Lord's Supper
Like Baptism, the Lord’s Supper is a divine ordinance to be
observed till the end of time. That it is a divine ordinance and command is
evident from Luke 22:19 and 1 Cor. 11: 24, 25: “This do in remembrance of Me;”
and that this command is in effect till the last day is evident from the “till
He come” of 1 Cor.
The Lord’s Supper has in common with private absolution and
Baptism, the individual assurance of the forgiveness of sins. What is peculiar
to the Lord’s Supper is the confirmation of the assurance of the forgiveness of
sins, by the imparting of the body of Christ given for us, and of the blood of
Christ shed for us. The sequence of Baptism, as the Sacrament of initiation, and
the Lord’s Supper, as the Sacrament of confirmation, is similar to the relation
between circumcision and the Passover in the Old Testament, no person being
permitted to eat of the Passover unless previously circumcised (Exodus
12:48).
The Scriptural doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, based upon
the words of institution, is that bread and wine and
body and blood of Christ are present in such a way that with the bread Christ’s
body and with the wine Christ’s blood is distributed and received in a unique union which takes place only in the Sacrament of
the Lord’s Supper and hence is fittingly called a sacramental union. This is the Lutheran doctrine, and
it is also the doctrine of the Christian Church for centuries before the
invention by the Roman Church of the fiction called “transubstantiation”, or the
denial by the Reformed Churches that the true body and blood of Christ are
present in accordance with His words.
The papistical teaching that bread and wine are changed
into the body and blood of Christ through the consecration of a Romish priest is
refuted by the fact that after the consecration, bread and wine are still named
as present, 1 Cor. 11: 26, 27, 28. The Reformed teaching, that the body and
blood of Christ are present in the Lord’s Supper only in representation, or
symbolically, not really, is refuted by the fact that Christ expressly describes
the body, which He distributes to be eaten with the mouth in the Lord’s Supper,
as “My body which is given for you” (Luke 22:19), and expressly describes His
blood, which He distributes to be drunk with the mouth in the Lord’s Supper, as
“My blood which is shed for many” (Matt. 26:28). Also the word “communion,” in 1
Cor.
So completely is the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper
expressed by these words, as they stand in Matt. 26:26–28; Mark 14:22–24; Luke
22:19, 20; 1 Cor. 11:23–25, that we need only transcribe them in order to state
our doctrine, as follows:
“Our Lord Jesus Christ, the same night in which He was
betrayed, took bread; and when He had given thanks, He brake it and gave it to
His disciples, saying, Take, eat; this is My body, which is given for you. This
do in remembrance of Me. After the same manner also He took the cup when He had
supped, and when He had given thanks He gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of
it; this cup is the new testament in My blood, which is shed for you for the
remission of sins. This do, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of Me.”
Luther rightly said, in maintaining this Biblical doctrine,
that he had no need to prove his text, since it stands in Scripture. Only those
whose doctrine is not that of the Christian Church, as given in Scripture, need
to offer complicated explanations of what they think these words ought to mean,
or seek supports for their error in other passages of Scripture which do not
treat at all of the Lord’s Supper. A simple test, which anyone can apply to
those who profess to believe the doctrine of the Christian Church concerning the
Lord’s Supper, is to put the question: “What do unworthy communicants, if such
should come to the altar where the Lord’s Supper is being rightly administered,
receive?” The only correct answer is: “The true body and blood of Christ — but
to their condemnation” (1 Cor.
The benefit we derive from the
Lord’s Supper, however, is received through faith. Since the purpose of the
Lord’s Supper is the individual imparting or assurance of the forgiveness of
sins, and this assurance can be received only by faith, therefore only the truly
believing communicant obtains this benefit. The Savior, by imparting His body
and blood in the Lord’s Supper, desires to call forth in every communicant the
thought that through the atoning death of Christ, he has a gracious God, that
is, that he has the forgiveness of his sins. Hence Luther says: “I love it with
all my heart, the precious, blessed Supper of my Lord Jesus Christ, in which He
gives me His body and blood to eat and to drink also orally, with the mouth of
my body, accompanied by the exceedingly sweet, precious words: ‘Given for you,
shed for you.’ “
We are equally concerned about maintaining the truth of the
real presence of the body and blood of Christ, orally received by all
communicants wherever the Lord’s Supper is administered in accordance with His
institution, and about the believing eating and drinking of the body and blood
of Christ for the forgiveness of sins. Therefore Lutheran congregations and
pastors are very careful in their stewardship of the Sacrament to observe the
apostolic practice of “close communion,” excluding those who cannot or will not
examine themselves, who either do not know or do not believe that they receive
Christ’s true body and blood in the Sacrament and that this is given and shed
for them for the remission of sins. By the grace of God we have enough love,
even for our unbelieving or misbelieving fellow-men, to restrain them, to the
best of our knowledge and ability, from receiving the Lord’s body and blood to
their condemnation, “not discerning the Lord’s body” (1 Cor. 11:29). The Lord
administered His Supper not to the public but to His disciples.
A few further details in connection with the Lord’s Supper
may receive mention in closing:
1). The few verbal variations in the four records of the
words of institution (no difference whatever in the substance of what the words
say) may easily be accounted for by the fact that our Lord no doubt spoke the
words more than once as He went from one to another of the disciples in
administering each element.
2). The earthly elements designated in Scripture, in with
and under which the Lord gives us His body and blood, are bread, baked of flour
and water, and wine, the fermented juice of the grape. No substitution may be
made for either. While the word used for “bread” in the Greek New Testament does
not apply exclusively either to wheat, rye, or barley, etc., to leavened or
unleavened bread, yet we know from the fact that the Lord’s Supper was
instituted after the Passover meal that the bread on hand and used was
unleavened, and so our Church is accustomed to use unleavened wafers. The phrase
used to designate the wine in the Greek New Testament, “fruit of the vine,”
admits of no other meaning, according to its linguistic usage, than fermented
juice of the grape; and hence the substitution of “grape juice” in which the
natural process of fermentation has been artificially arrested, is not
legitimate.
3). There is no Scriptural basis for the idea that the
sacramental union takes place aside from the act of eating and drinking. Christ
says: “Take eat; this is My body.” “Drink ye all of it; this is My blood.” Hence
the reservation or carrying about of the consecrated “host” (the meaning of the
word in Latin is “victim,” and it refers to the wafers used in the Sacrament) is
no Lord’s Supper but a mockery of the Lord’s Supper, and the worship of the host
is idolatry. Hence we know what to think of the “Eucharistic congresses” of the
Romanists.
4). The Romish perversion of God’s great gift to us in the
Sacrament into a “sacrifice” which the priest offers to God to atone for the
sins of the living and the dead is a blasphemous denial of Christ’s one atoning
sacrifice on Calvary. The attempt of “high-church Lutherans” and other
high-churchmen to intrude some sort of “sacrificial” significance into the
Lord’s Supper is a Romanizing tendency. The Lord’s Supper is one of the three
means of grace, all of which have the same purpose and effect, to offer, convey,
and seal to us the grace which Christ has merited, and therefore should not be
exalted above the other means of grace. To do so is a Romanizing tendency. It is
the Word which gives effectiveness to both the Sacraments.
5). The Lord’s Supper is not effected (made effective or
valid) by the character of the one who administers the Lord’s Supper; also not
by the faith and piety of the recipients of the Lord’s Supper. The Lord’s Supper
is effected solely by the institution of Christ, which includes the command of
Christ to celebrate the Lord’s Supper till the last day (Luke
The great blessings bestowed upon us in the Lord’s Supper
should induce Christians to desire it frequently, to prepare for it carefully,
and to use it devoutly in faith.
It will be of
advantage to treat our theme under two main headings, in accordance with the
usage of Scripture, which employs the term “church” in two (and only two)
significations: A. The Church Universal; B. Local Churches.
A. The Church
Universal. The nature of the Christian
Church, in the primary significance of the term, as referring to the one holy
Christian Church (invisible) of our Creed, may be defined as follows: The
Christian Church consists of men (people) who believe in Christ, that is,
believe that God forgives them their sins for the sake of Christ’s vicarious
satisfaction. This definition is clearly given us by Scripture in Acts
The attributes of the Christian Church, according to Holy
Scripture, are: invisibility, unity, holiness, universality, and
apostolicity.
a). The Church is
invisible, because faith in the Gospel of the
forgiveness of sins, which faith makes a person a member of the Church, is known
only to God, but is invisible to the eyes of man. 1 Kings 8:39: “For Thou, even
Thou only, knowest the hearts of all the children of men.” Luke 17:20, 21: “The
b). The Church is
one, John
c). The Church is
holy, 1 Peter 2:9: “an holy nation;” in the first place, entirely and
perfectly holy through the righteousness of Christ imputed to faith, Rom. 4:5: “his faith is counted for
righteousness;” in the second place, incompletely holy through the inherent
righteousness of life, Rom. 6:14: “sin shall not
have dominion over you,” every member of the Church being under the sanctifying
influence of the Holy Spirit who dwells within believers (John 14:17: “He
dwelleth with you, and shall be in you”).
d). The Church is
universal, for it embraces the believers in the Lord
of all times, among all peoples, and in all places. Acts
e). The Church is
apostolic, in the sense of holding fast to the
apostolic doctrine. Acts
The dignity and
glory of the Church is seen in the fact that her members, as such, are subject
only to Christ, that they are the possessors of the keys of the
a). Her members,
as such, are subject to no man, but only to Christ, Matt. 23:8; 1 Cor. 7:23: “Ye
are bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men.” With this the command
to “obey them that have the rule over you” (or better: “guide you”), “and submit
yourselves” is not in conflict. For the obedience of Christians to their
teachers is limited to God’s Word which the teachers proclaim; and if they teach
otherwise than God’s Word teaches, then God’s command to the hearers is: “Avoid
them!” (Rom.
b). The members of
the Church, or the believers, are the original possessors of the means of grace,
1 Peter 2:9; Matt. 28:19, 20, and consequently of the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, Matt. 18:18, which
assertion is not refuted but confirmed by Matt. 16:18, 19, because according to
the context the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven are given to Peter, not in his
character as an apostle, but inasmuch as he believes
in Christ.
c). The members of
the Church, or the believers, possess all things, 1
Cor. 3:21, 22: “all things are yours.” In their interest, and indeed by them, the whole world is ruled, Rom.
How is the Church
founded and preserved?
a). God creates
and preserves the Church according to His grace,
Col. 1:12–14, and according to His omnipotence, Eph.
b). God creates
and preserves the Church not without means but by the means of grace. Hence
Scripture also ascribes the working of faith to the men who administer the means
of grace. Rom.
c). The State,
with its external power, is neither a means nor an auxiliary means for the
building of the Christian Church. The reason that we must maintain this
assertion is that faith in Christ comes not through external power, but only
through the Gospel. Therefore all those who want to employ the power of the
State as an auxiliary means for the building of the Christian Church are acting
foolishly and contrary to Scripture.
B. Local
Churches. Scripture speaks of the Church not only in the singular
(Eph.
The nature of the local church or congregation may be
defined as follows: The Christian local congregation is the congregation of believers or saints which
is gathered about Word and Sacraments at a particular place. The address of the
Corinthian congregation reads, 1 Cor. 1:2: “Unto the
The local church
is a divine institution. That the formation of local
congregations is a divine ordinance is established both by direct and indirect
Scripture proof, a.) The direct proof is derived from the fact that God has
commanded the Christians who live in one place not only to read God’s Word but
also to establish among themselves the office of the public ministry and to hear
the publicly preached Word, Titus 1:5: “For this cause left I thee in Crete,
that thou shouldest set in order the things that are
wanting, and ordain elders in every city, as I had
appointed thee.” (N.B. Paul did not give orders on his own authority, but
only in accordance with a divine ordinance), b). The
indirect proof is derived from the commission to the local congregation of
certain functions which themselves are exercised by divine command, for
instance, the exercise of church discipline on the part of the congregation
(Matt.
The distinction
between orthodox and heterodox local congregations
is Scriptural, because it is God’s ordinance that in all local congregations
only God’s Word should be taught and heard, 1 Peter 4:11: “as the oracles of
God.” Where there exists a deviation from the apostolic doctrine we are dealing
with an organization which is disobedient to God, and here Romans 16:17 and
Matthew 7:15 are to be applied in practice. “Now I beseech you, brethren, mark
them which cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which ye have
learned; and avoid them” (Rom.
There are indeed
children of God also in heterodox churches. There are members of the Christian
Church also in heterodox communions if and because so much of the Word of God is still taught,
heard, and read there, that men can thereby come to the knowledge that they
deserve damnation (through the Law) and may come to faith in Christ as the
Savior of sinners (through the Gospel). A Biblical example of this situation is
the Samaritan church, which, according to John
But God’s own
recognition of His children also in heterodox communions does not permit
orthodox Christians to practice fellowship with the heterodox. Church fellowship
with the heterodox is strictly forbidden in
By the word “schism” a division within the church is designated
which should not occur, and is therefore sinful, for
instance, a separation because of differences in church ceremonies, terminology,
etc., in general, because of such things as are neither commanded nor forbidden
in Scripture. The
Christian
congregations may in Christian liberty establish associations with sister
congregations of the same faith, in which they are represented by delegates in
accordance with stipulations agreed upon among the participants. But such a
“representative church” does not exist by divine ordinance, and hence there are
no individual persons (supreme head of the church, supreme head of the state)
nor any college of persons either within a single congregation or among several
congregations (board of elders, synodical delegates, council, board of
directors, etc.) who can determine ecclesiastical matters in such a way that the
consciences of the Christians should be bound
thereby. For in the Christian Church God’s Word is
the only authority which binds consciences. Matt. 23:8, 10: “One is your
Master.” Therefore councils, synods, etc. have only advisory power, not any
autonomous judicial power (“jurisdiction”) or legislative power.
The question may
arise whether we may vote on any question at all in the Christian Church. The
answer is that we may, but with this distinction: a). In matters of doctrine we
vote not to establish doctrine, but to determine
whether all have recognized the Christian doctrine in a point of controversy,
b). In matters of indifference (matters not determined by the Word of God) we
vote in order to determine what the majority holds to be fitting, while the
minority then yields to the majority, or conversely, the majority yields to the
minority for love’s sake.
XVI. The Ministry
The nature of the public ministry may be defined as
follows: Under the office of the public ministry we understand the proclamation
of the Word of God together with the administration of the Sacraments by commission of a Christian congregation. The
establishment of the public ministry always presupposes the commission of a
congregation; and the very word “public,” as used in this connection, has
reference to the Christian public, or congregation,
which stands behind the public minister, and through whose agency God has made
him a minister by means of the divine call extended to him. He is a public
servant, or minister, because of that definite Christian public, or
congregation, on whose behalf, by whose commission, and as whose representative,
he exercises all the functions of his ministry, both in house to house
visitations and in the pulpit. The minister can no more divest himself of his
public character, as representative of his congregation, when admonishing a
sinner in private or comforting an individual Christian in distress, or
administering Communion at the bedside of a sick person, or officiating at a
burial, than he can when he stands in the pulpit or ministers at the altar.
Always and everywhere, when performing the functions of his office, the minister
acts as the representative of Christ and of the Christian congregation which has
called him to function in its behalf in accordance with the revealed Word and
will of God, and hence is at all times responsible to Christ and the
congregation for every act which he performs in such capacity.
The commission of the congregation is expressed by the word
rendered in our King James Version of Acts 14:23 as “ordained,” a word which has
no connection with the act of “ordination” spoken of elsewhere in the New
Testament. The difference between the word used in Acts 14:23, and which refers
to the conducting of an election by a show of hands (in its only other
occurrence in the Greek New Testament, 2 Cor. 8:19, it is correctly rendered
“chosen” in our KJV), and the New Testament word for ordination (as used, for
instance, in 1 Tim. 4:14 and 2 Tim. 1:6) is that the former means, literally,
“stretching out of hands” (to vote in an election), while the latter means
“laying on of hands.” Thus the office of the public ministry is conveyed by the
call of a Christian congregation which results from
the choice, or election, of a certain individual to
exercise the official functions of the ministry by commission of the
congregation.
Besides the public ministry which is committed or delegated
to an individual by the call of a congregation we must hold fast to the divine institution also of that ministry which is
enjoined upon all Christians in 1 Peter 2:9; 3:15; and Col. 3:16 (not in a
public capacity, but as a personal spiritual endowment or spiritual priesthood,
which is inseparable from personal faith in Christ), which neither should nor can be
superseded by the public ministry.
Also missionaries in the field
of foreign or home missions are in the public ministry, even when congregations
have not yet been formed in the field of their labors; for behind the missionary
stand Christian congregations which by God’s command
send out missionaries, Matt. 28:19, 20.
As to the relation of the public ministry to the spiritual
priesthood of all Christians, as taught, for instance, in 1 Peter 2:9, we must
hold that the public ministry is distinct from the
spiritual priesthood for the following reasons: a), because the public ministry
requires a special call from a congregation for its
legitimate exercise; b). because a special aptitude to
teach is requisite in order to serve an entire congregation with the Word of
God: 1 Tim. 3:2; 1 Cor
1 Timothy 3:2–7: “A bishop must be blameless, the husband
of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to
teach; not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient,
not a brawler, not covetous; one that ruleth well in his own house, having his
children in subjection with all gravity; (for if a man know not how to rule his
own house, how shall he take care of the Church of God?) not a novice, lest
being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil. Moreover
he must have a good report of them which are without; lest he fall into reproach
and the snare of the devil.”
Titus 1:7–9: “A bishop must be blameless, as the steward of
God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to
filthy lucre; but a lover of hospitality, a lover of good men, sober, just,
holy, temperate; holding fast the faithful Word as he hath been taught, that he
may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the
gainsayers.”
The public ministry is not a human, but a divine
institution. What do we mean by calling the ministry a divine institution? Under
the divine institution of the public ministry we understand the fact that it is
not left to the option of the Christians who live in
a certain place whether they wish to establish the office of the ministry among
them or not, but they have a divine command to do so. This command is found in
Titus 1:5, where we read, with reference to the purpose of leaving Titus in
Crete: “that thou shouldest set in order the things that
are wanting, and ordain” (the word used in the original means “establish,”
and has nothing to do with the laying on of hands) “elders” (here in the sense of “preaching elders,” or
pastors, “elder” being the usual New Testament name for the local pastor) “in every city” (city by city, wherever congregations
had come into existence), “as I had appointed thee.”
The word “appoint” is used in the sense of “command, charge, give order,” a
common usage of the word in King James English and in full accord with the Greek
original. Since Paul was not accustomed to issue orders on his own authority
(compare 2 Cor. 8:8: “I speak not by commandment,” and v. 10: “herein I give my
advice, for this is expedient for you”), we must regard this command of Paul to
Titus as being given by divine authority, and hence as proof for the divine
institution of the ministry. Also the expression “the things that are wanting”
indicates that a congregation in which the office of the ministry was not yet
established lacked something which was essential to its divinely ordained form.
That it was also apostolic practice to establish the
office of the parish pastorate in each individual congregation we see from Acts
14:23, cited above, which may be plainly translated from the original: “When
they had conducted elections for pastors (elders) in every church, and had
prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord, on whom they had
believed.” This is also the teaching of our
As to the necessity of the public ministry, we must regard
this necessity, like the necessity of receiving the Sacraments, as not absolute
but relative. The public ministry is not absolutely necessary for salvation,
because faith in Christ can be created and preserved also through the reading of
Scripture and the functioning of the spiritual priesthood. However, an abuse of this truth occurs when Christians do not
diligently hear God’s Word in the public preaching, when the pastors do not
diligently prepare their sermons, and when congregations and pastors do not
diligently make provision for the education of preachers and teachers. As not
the deprivation but the contempt of the Sacraments damns, so we may say also of
the public ministry, in accordance with Luke 10:16: “He that heareth you”
(preachers of God’s pure Word) “heareth Me; and he that despiseth you despiseth
Me; and he that despiseth Me despiseth Him that sent Me.”
The incumbents of the office of the public ministry form no
special spiritual order superior to that of the Christians, like the priests of
the Old Testament, but are officers (public
servants) among the Christians. Therefore we call the incumbents of the public
ministry not “spiritual” or “priests,” because these titles, according to the
Scriptures of the New Testament, belong to all Christians (see 1 Peter 2:5, 9; 1
Cor.
Since the Christian Church is an absolute monarchy, in
which Christ through His Word has sole dominion, Matt. 23: 8–10, there results
there from a double truth: a). With regard to the authority of the servants of the Church, obedience is
due them when they teach God’s Word, Heb. 13:17; Luke 10:16; but obedience is to
be refused when they depart from God’s Word, Rom. 16:17. b). With regard to the
relation of the servants of the Church to one
another, all superiority and subordination is not of divine but only of human
right, for by divine right all are equal. In Luke 22:24–26, when the disciples
of Christ strive about rank, Christ answers them: “Ye shall not be so,” adding
the instruction that there are superiors and subordinates only in worldly kingdoms.
At this point we quote with great satisfaction, in
accordance with our aim of demonstrating the agreement of Lutheran doctrine with
universal Christian Biblical doctrine, the testimony of a great Bible scholar
who belonged to the Anglican or English Episcopal Church, where it is commonly
taught that there are three distinct and divinely ordained orders or ranks of
the clergy, namely bishops, priests (or presbyters), and deacons. Henry Alford
remarks on 1 Tim. 3:1 (“If a man desire the office of a bishop,” etc.): “The
‘bishops’ of the New Testament have officially nothing in common with our
bishops. The identity of the ‘bishop’ and ‘presbyter’ (or ‘elder’) in apostolic
times is evident from Titus 1:5–7.” In connection with Acts 20:17 (“called the
elders of the church”) and verse 28 of the same
chapter, and referring to the same persons (“take heed to yourselves, and to all
the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you bishops”), Alford points out the unfairness of
translating the Greek word for “bishops” in the latter verse as “overseers,”
whereas in every other passage of the New Testament where it occurs it is
translated “bishops.” If it had been uniformly rendered, as it ought to be, in
Acts
The public ministry is the highest office in the Christian
Church. As the local congregation is the only divinely instituted society in the
Christian Church (societies outside the congregation, such as synods, and
societies within the congregation, such as young men’s, young ladies’, ladies
guilds, men’s clubs, etc., are only human ordinances), so also the office of the
public ministry is the only divinely instituted public
office in the Christian Church. Auxiliary offices within the congregation
can according to need be branched off from the office of the ministry (elders,
teachers, almoners, etc., Acts 6), but these remain under the supervision and
responsibility of the pastor according to Acts 20:28: “Take heed unto
yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the
Holy Ghost hath made you bishops.” In this sense Luther calls the office of the
public ministry “the highest office in Christendom.”
At least a few lines must be added here with reference to
the Scripture doctrine concerning the Antichrist; for it is here, and not in the
treatment of “the last things,” that this doctrine belongs. Nothing in Scripture
suggests that either the rise or the revelation of the Antichrist is to take
place at the end of the world, though indeed his final
destruction will be accomplished by “the brightness of Christ’s coming” (2
Thess. 2:8). The Scripture warnings against the Antichrist form an appendage to
the doctrine of the ministry for the reason that the Antichrist described in 2
Thess. 2:3–12 represents the grossest perversion of the office of the public
ministry. He “sitteth in the temple of God,” that is, in the Christian Church,
and claims to be “the vicar of Christ,” and in that capacity to rule the church
on earth as a visible monarchy, setting himself above all divine authority
(“Object of worship”) and divinely ordained authority in the kingdoms of this
world (civil rulers in this respect being rightly “called gods,” as in Psalm
82:6, cited John 10:34, as those who “are sent by God for the punishment of
evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well,” 1 Peter 2:13, 14), as
though Christ had abdicated the throne of His Church upon earth or absented
Himself from His dominion in this world (2 Thess. 2:4). Yet the whole rule and
authority of Antichrist is nothing but the supreme apostasy from the central
article of Christian doctrine — justification by grace, for Christ’s sake,
through faith, without the deeds of the Law — which the papal sect curses in the
Sixth Session of its Council of Trent, especially canons 11, 12, and 20. Compare
2 Thess. 2:3, where the Holy Spirit calls the rule of “that man of sin,” “the
son of perdition,” by the name of “the apostasy”
(“falling away”). If anyone should fail to recognize that all these marks or
criteria of the Antichrist, including the “power and signs and lying wonders” of
2 Thess. 2:9, are completely fulfilled in the Roman papacy, and in it alone, or
should imagine the possibility of a still greater apostasy than the cursing of
the central doctrine of Christianity and substituting a human authority for that
of Christ — then such a person would show such ignorance of the chief enemy of
our holy faith as would be inexcusable in a teacher of Christians, or would
expose his failure to appreciate the supreme importance of the doctrine of
justification by faith alone. Finally, the suggestion that the Antichrist is not
assuredly identifiable would tend to make Scripture’s solemn warning not to let
ourselves be seduced by Antichrist vain and unprofitable for Christ’s
people.
As the blessings of the Gospel ministry are dear and
precious to us, so vigilantly must we guard against the seductions of its
counterpart, the Roman Antichrist.
N.B. For further information on the subject of the closing
paragraphs see Smalcald Articles, Part II, Art. IV (Triglotta, pp. 471–477), and
“Of the Power and Primacy of the Pope” (Triglotta, pp. 503–521); also “Brief
Statement,” Art. 17 (par. 43); and finally, “Our Confessional Platform,” by Dr.
P. E. Kretzmann, Art. 6, d.
XVII. Election of Grace
The doctrine of the election of grace, or eternal
predestination, has been revealed for the comfort and assurance of faith of
cross-bearing Christians. It is not a speculative doctrine but eminently
practical. All human perversions of this doctrine, however, which depart from
the truth of Scripture, are the result of
speculation, and do not impart comfort, but produce
either doubt and despair or carnal security. Neither is this doctrine one which
is remote from practical Christian life and experience, or which lies on the
periphery of Christian teaching, but rather one which, as it is taught in Scripture, squares with the
experience of every true Christian, and is most closely entwined with the
central doctrines of our most holy Faith. For from the Scripture passages which
treat of eternal election we learn that God has from
eternity resolved to do for His Christians what He has effected in them in time. Hence we may define the election of grace as
the act of God by which from eternity out of pure grace for Christ’s sake and by
way of the means of grace He has decreed to bestow those blessings on the
Christians which through His call they now enjoy, namely, conversion,
justification, sanctification, and preservation in faith. This definition is
derived from Rom.
Thus Scripture traces back to eternal election as its cause, in the first place, the sum total of spiritual
blessings imparted to Christians in time, Eph. 1:3–6: “Blessed be the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual
blessings in heavenly places in Christ: according as He hath chosen us in Him
before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame
before Him in love: having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by
Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the
praise of the glory of His grace, wherein He hath made us accepted in the
Beloved;” secondly, and specifically, their call, 2 Tim. 1:9: “God hath saved
us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but
according to His own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus
before the world began;” thirdly, their conversion or their faith in the Gospel,
Acts 13:48: “As many as were ordained to eternal life believed;” or, as summed
up in Rom. 8:28–30, quoted above, their call, justification, and glorification.
All these divine dealings are comprehended in the eternal act of election. Thus those who have followed
through the previous chapters of this book, or any orthodox presentation of the
way of salvation, in orderly sequence up to this point, learn nothing new in the
study of this doctrine except that God from eternity purposed to do for His
Christians what He effects in them in time. In the doctrine of eternal election
a person can go astray only if he has previously
forsaken the teaching of Scripture regarding the way of salvation, which is a
way of grace.
It is important, therefore, that we consider eternal
election in its proper setting. Scripture states: “God hath from the beginning
chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the
truth” (2 Thess.
Thus if we are asked by someone: “Am I elect?” we
immediately ask the inquirer: “Do you believe the Gospel?” If he answers: “By
the grace of God I do believe the Gospel,” then we shall answer his original
question: “You can and should count yourself among the elect.” But if the
inquirer raises an objection to our question concerning his faith in the Gospel,
in some such fashion as the following: “What has my faith to do with it? If I
belong to the elect, I shall and must be saved; but if I do not belong to the
elect, I shall and must be lost, no matter whether I now
believe or not:” then we shall have to answer that we cannot discuss
election in this manner, for there is no such absolute eternal election without
faith in the Gospel. Election is a comforting doctrine for believers because it
assures them that the faith God has bestowed upon them is a carrying out of His
eternal purpose of grace. But election is no concern of the unbeliever. He
cannot comfort himself with the Scriptural doctrine of election, for there is no
evidence that the doctrine applies to him. If he is elect he will be brought to
faith. But only after that can he rightly concern himself with the doctrine of
election. This practical way of regarding eternal election in connection with
God’s revelation of His grace in the Gospel is the only correct and Scriptural
way of using this doctrine. So important is this matter to the confessors of our
Church who drew up the Formula of Concord of 1577, that they expounded the
practical bearing of the doctrine of election in the famous “eight points” in
such a simple and direct and clear manner that we are impelled to include the
entire quotation (Concordia Triglotta, p. 1069) in this article as a
presentation to which every Christian who accepts the Scriptural doctrine of election will necessarily
agree:
“God in His purpose and counsel ordained:
“1. That the human race is truly redeemed and reconciled
with God through Christ, who, by His faultless obedience, suffering, and death,
has merited for us the righteousness which avails before God, and eternal life.
“2. That such merit and benefits of Christ shall be
presented, offered, and distributed to us through His Word and Sacraments.
“3. That by His Holy Ghost, through the Word, when it is
preached, heard, and pondered, He will be efficacious and active in us, convert
hearts to true repentance, and preserve them in the true faith.
“4. That He will justify all those who in true repentance
receive Christ by a true faith, and will receive them into grace, the adoption
of sons, and the inheritance of eternal life.
“5. That He will also sanctify in love those who are thus
justified, as
“6. That He also will protect them in their great weakness
against the devil, the world, and the flesh, and rule and lead them in His ways,
raise them again, when they stumble, comfort them under the cross and in
temptation, and preserve them.
“7. That He will also strengthen, increase, and support to
the end the good work which He has begun in them, if they adhere to God’s Word,
pray diligently, abide in God’s goodness, and faithfully use the gifts received.
“8. That finally He will eternally save and glorify in life
eternal those whom He has elected, called, and justified.”
Who, then, are the elect? The elect are not all men; the
elect are not those actually saved plus those who
“for a while believe, and in time of temptation fall away” (Luke 8:13) and “die
in their sins” (Ezek. 3:20); the elect are only the
actually saved children of God, since Scripture teaches that all the elect are
surely saved, John 10:27, 28: “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they
follow Me: and I give unto them eternal life: and they shall never perish,
neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand.” Christ will never allow one
who is trusting in Him (not in himself) for preservation in faith to fall from
faith. Therefore Christians can and should be sure of their eternal election,
for they are addressed as elect in Holy Scripture and are comforted with their
eternal election; “God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation” (2
Thess. 2:13); “having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus
Christ to Himself (Eph. 1:5); “knowing, brethren beloved, your election of God”
(1 Thess. 1:4). To the Christians all things must work together for good, “who
are the called according to His purpose.”
The way to become sure of one’s eternal election is by
faith in the Gospel of Christ, since eternal election is revealed through the
Gospel, 2 Tim. 1:9, 10; 2 Thess. 2:13, 14. The Gospel of Christ is a declaration
of God’s love to the world, in which the lost sinner is assured that God is not
angry with him but loves him, and loves him so much (John 3:16) that He gave His
Son to become incarnate, suffer, and die for him. This is the argument of the
apostle Paul in Rom. 8:31, 32. Hence also Luther writes: “Behold the wounds of
Christ and His blood shed for you, and from these predestination will shine
forth.” Indeed a Christian must first have put the Gospel in its manifold
attestation (Word of the Gospel, Baptism, Lord’s Supper, Absolution) out of his sight before he can be uncertain of his election.
The relation of faith to the election of grace is two-fold.
In the eternal act of election the faith worked by
the Holy Ghost is the means of election: “God hath
from the beginning chosen you to salvation through
sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth” (2 Thess.
If we ask, however, as to the relation in which the faith
which the Christians have in time stands to their
election, Scripture teaches that their faith is an effect or consequence of their eternal election: “As
many as were ordained to eternal life believed” (Acts
The purpose of the doctrine of election is not the denial
or restriction of universal grace (for Scripture clearly teaches universal
grace, as has been demonstrated in the chapter on “Saving Grace,” Chapter V),
but the confirmation of the doctrine of salvation by grace alone, as is evident,
for instance, from Rom. 9:16: “So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him
that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy.” Scripture does not teach an
election of wrath or predestination to damnation. The Scriptural doctrine of
election is the doctrine of the election of grace.
It belongs wholly to the Gospel. We close with a strong assertion of this truth
from the Formula of Concord (Concordia Triglotta, p. 1093, par. 92): “For, as
the apostle testifies, Rom. 15:4: ‘Whatsoever things were written aforetime were
written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures
might have hope.’ But when this consolation and hope are weakened or entirely
removed by Scripture, it is certain that it is understood and explained contrary
to the will and meaning of the Holy Ghost.”
Under the last
things we understand those things which still lie in the future for mankind and
the entire world: temporal death, the state of souls between death and
resurrection, the return of Christ to judgment, the resurrection of the dead,
the final judgment, the end of the world, eternal damnation and eternal
life.
1. Temporal
death. Temporal death is not the annihilation of man, neither
according to the soul (Matt. 20:28: Christ gave “His
life,” or, literally: His soul, “a ransom for many”), nor yet according to the
body (John 5:28, 29: “All that are in the graves
shall hear His voice, and shall come forth”). Temporal death is a separation of
soul and body (Luke 12:20: “This night thy soul shall be required of thee;” also
see Eccles. 12:7). A good example of the meaning of temporal death is to be
found in the words in which Holy Scripture describes the true death of Christ:
He “yielded up the ghost” (spirit), “gave up the ghost” (Matt. 27:50; John
19:30).
The cause of death
is not an originally defective constitution of human nature, but the sin of man. Gen. 2:17: “In the day that thou eatest
thereof thou shalt surely die.” Rom.
The only liberator
from death is Christ, since He paid man’s debt of sin. Rom.
With regard to the
death of Christians Scripture says: first, that they still die, and thus must
still go through the process of dissolution (Rom.
Hence the
Scripture gives death many sweet and beautiful names: “to fall asleep,” Acts
7:60; “to depart and be with Christ,” Phil.
2. The
intermediate state. Only few Scripture passages treat of the state of souls
between death and resurrection. The Scripture directs the attention of men
primarily to the last day and the following state of eternal blessedness and
eternal damnation. But from a few clear passages of Scripture we know: a). The
souls of the believers between death and resurrection are in a state of blessed
enjoyment of God, with Jesus (Acts
3. The return of
Christ to judgment. The exact time (day, hour, year) of Christ’s return in
glory is unascertainable by man: “Of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not
the angels of heaven, but My Father only” (Matt. 24:36; also Mark
But in addition to
the true signs of Christ’s return, which He Himself has given us, men have
invented certain fictitious signs, especially two, namely, a still future
millennial kingdom of Christ here upon earth, and a still future general
conversion of the Jews. Because of the importance of guarding our blessed hope
against being diverted from its proper object, we shall devote a paragraph to
each of these fictitious signs.
The imaginary
millennial kingdom is regarded as a visible kingdom which Christ is to set up
here in this world for the space of a thousand years before judgment day. The
ideas which are harbored concerning this supposed kingdom vary from the crass
notions of a kingdom of earthly blessings in which the Christians will also
outwardly and visibly constitute the dominant power in this world, to a vague
“hope of better times,” but in every case lack all foundation in Scripture,
which represents the last days before Christ’s return to judgment, as times in
which faith will scarcely be found upon earth and the cross which Christians
must bear at all times will be intensified (Luke 18:8). These dreams are refuted
by demonstrating that the Scripture passages to which millennialists appeal are,
in Scripture itself, referred to the Church of the
New Testament, for instance: a). The coming of men to Mount Zion (Is. 2:2–4,
etc.) is fulfilled whenever and wherever in the
world men believe the Gospel (Heb. 12:22ff); b). The coming of peace into the
world (Is. 9:5; Is. 11:6–9; Zech.
The other
fictitious sign of Christ’s return which constantly accompanies millennial hopes
is the expectation of a future general conversion of all the Jews. This is
generally supposed to be based upon Rom.
In closing this
discussion of the signs preceding the return of Christ to judgment, which we
have found it necessary, on account of current false teachings, to treat in
considerable detail, we may remark that if we confine ourselves to the signs
which Christ Himself foretold, it may be confidently asserted that all of these
preliminary signs have been already fulfilled, and that hence there is nothing
which we need expect to intervene between the times in which we live and the
glorious advent of our Savior at the end of the world. We may and should daily
and eagerly look forward to His appearing; and yet we have, of course, no
guarantee that He will come during our life-time. “That day and that hour”
remains hidden from us and will so remain until He comes. True Christians,
however, even among those who have been deluded into expecting a millennium,
nevertheless, by a happy inconsistency, fix the true faith and hope of their
hearts upon the return of their Savior to judge the world at the last day and the heavenly glory thereafter unto all eternity. And so, also on this much
controverted subject, “we all believe in one true God” who will send His Son in
the glory of the Father with all His holy angels, at a day and an hour which we
know not, to deliver us from this present evil world, and graciously take us
from this vale of tears to Himself in heaven.
4. The
resurrection of the dead. The doctrine of
the bodily resurrection of the dead is a primary fundamental article of our
Christian religion, so that whoever denies it has abandoned the Christian faith
and is not a member of the Christian Church. So it was with Hymenaeus and
Philetus (2 Tim.
5. The Final
Judgment. Christ, the incarnate Son of God, the Savior of all men,
is at the end of the world also the Judge of all men, John 5:22; Acts 17:31. The
apparent contradiction between Scripture passages such as Rom.
6. The end of the
world. The fact that the world will perish is abundantly taught
in Scripture, for instance, in Luke 21:33: “Heaven and earth shall pass away,”
in contrast to the Word of God which “shall not pass away.” Scripture, however,
does not clearly settle the question as to whether this destruction is to be
thought of as a total annihilation or only as a transformation. 1 Cor. 7:31:
“the fashion of this world passeth away,” as well as
what
7. Eternal
damnation and eternal life. Both facts are
placed side by side in Matt. 25:46: The godless “shall go away into everlasting
punishment; but the righteous into life eternal.” One of these doctrines cannot
be denied without denying the other. And neither can be denied, without denying
the Christian religion. One who believes in Jesus as his Savior will certainly
believe both in that which He has saved him from and
that which He has saved him unto — the eternal
blessedness which all believers in Christ shall inherit by His merit. Eternal
damnation consists in eternal banishment from God’s presence: “Depart from Me,
ye cursed, into everlasting fire” (Matt. 25:41). Eternal blessedness consists in
the eternal beholding of God: “Come, ye blessed of My Father” (Matt. 25:34); “We
know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2).
The End.
About The Author
Wallace H. McLaughlin was born on
Convinced of the Doctrine of Verbal Inspiration, he entered
the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. During 1927–1928 he did post-graduate work
(leading to Master of Sacred Theology degree — 1936) at Concordia Theological
Seminary,
Convinced of the compromising stance of the Common
Confession (1950) he helped organize the Orthodox Lutheran Conference. In 1951
he was elected the first president of the OLC; and between 1952 and 1959 was
Professor at the Orthodox Lutheran Seminary,
From 1959 to 1971 he was Pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran
Church,
His convictions he imparted to hundreds of Christians in
his pastoral care, and to dozens of theological seminary students. The thousands
of individuals, on two continents and in three states (Pennsylvania, Minnesota,
and Michigan) whom he served in various capacities, know that there was a man,
who, though quiet and unassuming, was a mighty instrument in the hand of the
Lord, our Saviour, for the
presentation and preservation of His eternal Word of Truth.
Soli Deo
Gloria!
Dedication
This book is dedicated to
LAVINA
his wife
a true companion and a
strong support
in all his joys and sorrows.