LutheranUniversalistsWillBeDamned has left a new comment on your post "Parsing the Moldstad Deception - All UOJ Advocates...":
I have no idea what the author of this pamphlet was trying to accomplish. None. Except, perhaps to cast aspersion upon the Book of Concord.
In the left column, one reads a faithful and balanced selection of Scripture. The layman reads it and sees what he is familiar with: "saved through faith," "righteousness from God comes through faith," "justified by faith," "through faith in Christ," "Believed God... credited to him as righteousness... faith is credited as righteousness." To this the layman responds, "Yup, yup, get it, got it, makes sense..."
Then in the right column, he reads the heading, "The Roman Catholic Church," and immediately the layman thinks: "Roman Catholics. Bad. Very Bad." And sure enough, as he reads it, he is confronted with phrases like: "If anyone says that the faith which makes men righteous is nothing else than trust... or that it is only this trust that makes righteous, let him be accursed." To which the layman further thinks: "Yup, yup, got it, confirmed, Roman Catholic = Bad".
But then there is the center column. The "Lutheran Confessions" column. When the layman reads the quote from the Augsburg Confession, he sees that it says what he just read in the column to his left: "Men... are freely justified for Christ's sake, through faith, when they believe... This faith God imputes for righteousness in His sight."
But when he reads the words from "Luther's Small Catechism" -- which don't come from "Luther's Catechism" at all, but from the "ELS Catechism" -- he reads: "God the Father has by grace forgiven all sinners and declared them righteous... He therefore regards them as though they had never sinned..."
And the Lutheran layman, if he is both literate and honest with himself, thinks: "Huh?"
It is clear to any layman with half a brain that the quote from the "Augsburg Confession" and the quote from (faux) "Luther's Catechism" do not say the same thing in any way whatsoever. One says in direct terms "justified through faith" and the other "forgiven and righteous already". To place these quotes next to each other as if they are equivalent, or even complementary, forces a reader to do one of two things: either he accepts, based on the authority of the church body which directs him to do so on pain of excommunication, that they are consistent, and forces himself to sink into incoherent thinking on the matter and into a trust in man, in addition to his Bible, that his pastors/theologians have it correct even if he can't possibly understand such "deep insights," OR, he continues to regard them as contradictory, as they plainly are, and to doubt the "source" from which they were taken, the "Lutheran Confessions," as hopelessly inconsistent and untrustworthy "writings of mere men."
