No man is so smart and pious that he does not need the external, objectively certain Word of God.

“Everything which is proclaimed about the spirit without this Word (that is, the external Word) and Sacrament, that is the devil.” (SA III.VIII.10; Triglotta p. 496)

Faith is to rely--even against reason and “experience”--on God’s Word, as it is written in the Scripture.

Natural man has a spirit of revolution against God and His infallible Word.

With modern theology, everything in the church of God is turned backwards and upside down. Faith no longer rests on the Scripture, but the Scripture rests on faith.

According to modern theology, the Church is no longer built on the ground of the Apostles and Prophets, rather the church stands on its own and the writings of the Apostles and Prophets are a growth, needing improvements, on the tree of the Church.

According to modern theology, it is not Scripture that judges what is right or wrong in the Church, but the Church judges what is true and false in Scripture.

The Scripture contains no errors, but in all its words is unbreakable truth.

Of the Son of God we confess against the modern error particularly, that he is with the Father and the Holy Ghost “equally God of power and honor.”

Every teaching that makes the Son lesser in His divine nature than the Father, we hold to be a fall back into pagan polytheism. For if the Son is lesser in His being than the Father, then there is not one, but several divine beings.

Of the Son of God, we confess that he became human in the fullness of his divine nature. We reject the teaching of Kenotics; that the Son of God laid a part of the divine characteristics, omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence to the side, and thus became man as a half-God.

We hold even more firmly that the Son of God, even in the state of humiliation, possessed the entire divine glory, and so the Lord of Glory with his acts and suffering stepped into the middle for us and through that accomplished an eternal redemption.

We distance ourselves decisively from every teaching through which a cooperation of man in his own conversion is accepted as a radical falsification of the entirety of Christianity.

We believe on the basis of the Holy Scripture that the natural man is not merely half-dead, but dead—really dead—in sins; that the natural man does not reach out to salvation in Christ, but holds the same for foolishness and, as far as is in him, defends himself against it.

Every conversion that comes to be stands not a half, nor a quarter, not even to a thousandth part on the cooperation or good behavior of man, but is entirely a work of the Holy Ghost, who accomplishes it in us with His almighty power of grace through the means of grace.

Conversion is not an improvement of the old man, nor an arousal (excitatio) of powers still slumbering in man, but a rebirth effected by God, the awakening of someone spiritually dead, the implanting of a new spiritual life.

All human striving remains in the area of the flesh. Spirit never comes from flesh. One cannot release the spirit from the flesh through schooling, education and culture, nor through logic, nor through psychology, nor through metaphysics, simply because it’s not in there.

Only God's almighty hand of grace can bridge the gap, uncrossable for humans, between flesh and spirit.

It is God’s grace alone that has saved us.

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