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Text preparation and translation by BackToLuther using DeepL, Google Translate, Microsoft Translate, Yandex Translate. All bold text is Pieper's emphasis. All highlighting, red text, and most text in square brackets [ ] is mine.
The Foundation of the Christian Faith.
Also the Papists are by no means sparing with the use of the word “grace”. They assure us, as often as we want to hear it, that also according to their teachings man becomes righteous and blessed by grace. But they understand by the justifying and saving grace not God's mercy or God's gracious disposition, according to which God forgives sin for Christ's perfect merit—this doctrine is expressly cursed in the Tridentinum—but by “Grace” the Papists understand the so-called “poured in grace” (gratia infusa), that is, a good quality found in man (illis inhaeret); in short, they understand “grace” as sanctification and good works. 86) Also the enthusiasts, if they point away from the external means of grace, cannot understand by “grace” God's graciousness, but only a poured in grace, a good nature or renewal in man, which is worked by the Holy Spirit without means. Why? The reason is this: His graciousness (Luther: “grace or favour”), according to which God forgives our sin or justifies us for the sake of Christ’s satisfactio vicaria, reveals God only in the means of grace ordered by Him and can be believed by us only on the basis of the means of grace. So far as the enthusiasts [the “swarmers”] now set aside the means of grace, they are forced to refer sinners who ask for God's grace to an immediate effective renewal in the heart of man as a basis for confidence in God's grace. But that is a doctrine of works.
It should not be forgotten that this immediate [or direct] spiritual effect, on which the enthusiasts of Zwingli and Calvin up to Hodge and Shedd lead a poor sinner, only exists in man’s imagination. According to Scripture, we men cannot expect any revelation of grace and any effect of grace besides and beyond the means of grace. “The words that I speak unto you,” Christ teaches us, “they are spirit, and they are life.” (John 6:63) Thus, for a man who has fallen under the treatment of a consistent enthusiast, there is nothing left to do but to produce from himself, from his own natural inner being, such soul moods, states, changes and works, which have an external resemblance to the true product of the Holy Spirit, and to base his faith on them. Luther therefore says of the enthusiasts, when they let the Word (the means of grace) go: 88) “They hold and teach just the same as was taught in the Papacy: that a man who does what is in him is saved.” Thus the setting aside of the means of grace of necessity drifts towards the Roman doctrine of works. The
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85) Sessio VI, can.12. .
86) Sessio VI, can.11.
enthusiasts didn't want this. They wanted the opposite. By reforming the divine revelation and the grace of the Holy Spirit from the “vehicle” of the external means of grace, they wanted to reform better and more thoroughly than Luther, and sweep away the papist leaven that Luther still overlooked. But by replacing the external means ordered by God with an immediate effect of the Holy Spirit in their own carnal wisdom, which does not even exist, they got stuck in the religion inherent in the flesh, the righteousness of works, and returned to the Papist camp as far as the attainment of grace and salvation was concerned.
So the practical result for papists and enthusiasts, if they remain consistent, is the same, namely doubt and despair of the grace of God, because from the works of the Law no flesh becomes righteous before God. That in the camp of the Reformed fellowships, which officially put in the place of the means of grace an immediate revelation and effect of the Holy Spirit, there are Christians who become and are certain of the grace of God, is only because, as has already been stated, contestation and need of death drive them to the Lutheran standpoint. They leave the sandy ground of an immediate action of the Holy Spirit and take hold of their faith in an external Word of the Gospel that promises them the forgiveness of sins for the sake of the Blood of Christ. Even the famous representatives of the immediate effect of the spirit take up the inconsistency even in their positive doctrinal presentation. Calvin can serve as an example. Although Calvin, just like Zwingli, advocates the axiom that the Holy Spirit does not need a “vehicle”, and even expressly warns against judging God's will of grace against mankind from the general vocation that occurs through the external word (per externum Verbi praedicationem), (Inst. III, 24, 8) he can nevertheless – in contradiction with it – occasionally say: (Inst. III, 2, 6) “The Word is the basis by which faith is supported and preserved; if it deviates from it, it falls away. So if you take away the Word, there is no faith left,”
so that it is admitted, of course, that the Zwinglian-Calvinist Reformation, to the extent that it was carried out alongside and against Luther's Reformation and was intended to improve it, was actually a pseudo-reformation, a reformation through which the souls were not led to the foundation of the Christian faith, but were led away by it.
Finally, we remember that in the setting aside of the means of grace by the enthusiasts, a disease appears, [page 258] which we, too, have to combat throughout our lives. What the enthusiasts officially and fundamentally do, namely to make the “poured in grace” [or “infused grace”] the foundation of the Christian faith, is also done by these Christians, who teach correctly about the means of grace and also believe correctly in the rule, often unofficially and in contradiction with their right teaching. They do this as often as in the knowledge of their sin and damnableness they want to base the certainty of God's grace or the forgiveness of their sins on their personal nature, on the feeling of grace, etc., i.e. on the “poured in grace”, instead of on God's promise of grace in the objective means of grace. “We are all born enthusiasts.” Luther: 91) “Flesh and blood always gropes at other consolations than the Word; for it always wants to have something that it can see and feel and hang on to with senses and reason.”
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Pieper's teaching on the Lutheran doctrine of the Means of Grace is crystal clear and is based on the Holy Scriptures. Comparatively, today's LC-MS enthusiastic "sacramental theology" wants to exclude the reading of the Word as one of the Means of Grace, thereby distancing themselves from Lutheranism (and Walther), and so end up as Romanizing Lutherans.
This is confirmed in the massive 2011 CPH/LC-MS book of church history The Church From Age To Age as it refers to the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church, p. 844:
“… the long-held Western Christian confession of the Athanasian Creed, which is an official confession for Roman Catholics as well as orthodox Protestant churches. The creed states that only those who worship the Holy Trinity and confess the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ can be saved.”
This affirmation of Roman Catholicism by the LC-MS willfully ignores the Papists' denial of the foundation of Christianity, the Doctrine of Justification. Pieper shows, as do the Lutheran Confessions, that the Roman Catholic Church understands "'grace' as sanctification and good works", and thereby denies the fruit of the Incarnation and Resurrection. Rome did not overturn their "infused grace" theology in Vatican II, a theology that Luther so earnestly contended against. Is it any wonder that the college textbook Religion in America (4th edition, p. 58) by Unitarian "minister" Rev. Julia Corbett-Hemeyer says the LC-MS is a "consensus religion" and "is now a part of the broad consensus". — In the next Part 17…
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