362. 6. The Lord, Goodwill, and Faith Form a Unity in the Same Way Our Life, Our Will, and Our Intellect Form a Unity; If We Separate Them, Each One Crumbles like a Pearl That Is Crushed to Powder

First I must mention some things that till now have been unknown in the scholarly world and therefore also unknown to the clergy. These things have been as hidden, in fact, as things that are buried in the ground. Yet they are treasure chests full of wisdom. Unless they are dug up and presented to the public, people will struggle in vain to develop a just concept of God, faith, and goodwill; we will not know how we ought to manage and prepare the state of our life now for the state of eternal life.

The things that have been unknown are these: We are nothing but an organ that receives life. Everything belonging to life flows into us from the God of heaven, who is the Lord. There are two faculties in us that receive life: they are called the will and the intellect. The will is a vessel for love and the intellect is a vessel for wisdom. Therefore the will is a vessel for goodwill and the intellect is a vessel for faith.

[2] All our willing and all our understanding flow in from outside us. The good impulses that relate to love and goodwill and the true insights that relate to wisdom and faith flow in from the Lord. All the things that oppose these flow in from hell. The Lord has provided that we feel inside us, as if they were our own, the things that flow in from outside. As a result, we produce from ourselves good impulses and true insights as if they were our own, although none of them is actually ours. They are nonetheless attributed to us as our own in order to give us free choice in willing and thinking, and to grant us concepts of what is good and what is true from which we can freely select whatever suits our temporal and eternal life.

[3] If you look askance or through squinting eyes at what I have just presented, you might draw many insane conclusions from it; but if you look at it squarely, you will be able to draw many wise conclusions from it. To help you look at it squarely, I needed first to present judgments and crucial teachings related to God and the divine Trinity. Later in the work I will lay out judgments and crucial teachings related to faith and goodwill, free choice, reformation and regeneration, and the assignment of spiritual credit or blame, as well as repentance, baptism, and the Holy Supper as means to an end.

177. 6. The Nicene and Athanasian views of the Trinity led to a faith that has perverted the whole Christian church. On the Nicene and Athanasian Trinity being a trinity of gods, see the evidence from those creeds given above at 172. Those creeds gave rise to the faith in the modern-day church, which is a faith in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The faith in God the Father is that he assigns and ascribes to us the justice of his Son the Savior. The faith in God the Son is that he intercedes and bargains for us. The faith in the Holy Spirit is that he actually instills the justice of the Son that has been assigned to us and seals it as an established fact by justifying us, sanctifying us, and regenerating us. This is the modern faith, which is enough evidence all by itself to prove that the church acknowledges and worships a trinity of gods.

[2] In any church, not only all its worship but also all its dogma ultimately go back to that church's faith. You could say, then, that the nature of a church's faith determines the nature of its teachings. It follows that the faith in question, because it is a faith in three gods, has perverted every aspect of the church. Faith is an origin; teachings are derived from it. What is derived receives its essence from its origin.

If you carefully examine the church's individual teachings - for example, on God, the person of Christ, goodwill, repentance, regeneration, free choice, the selection of the chosen people, the purpose of the sacraments of baptism and the Holy Supper - you will clearly see that there is a trinity of gods in each one of them. If some teaching does not make the Trinity completely apparent, it still flows from the Trinity the way water flows from a spring.

I cannot present an examination of this kind here, but it would be worth presenting at some point, to open people's eyes to the relationship between teachings and faith. Therefore I will show this relationship in an appendix to this work.

[3] The church's faith in God is like a body's soul. The church's teachings are like the body's limbs.

Faith in God is also like a queen, and dogmatic teachings are like her court officials. Just as the officials hang on the queen's every word, so dogmatic teachings depend on the stated faith.

One can judge solely from its faith how a given church understands the Word. A faith adapts the Word to itself. As if the faith had ropes, it pulls whatever it can get from the Word in its own direction.

If a faith is false, it commits prostitution with every truth in the Word, dragging that truth into perversion and falsifying it. A false faith drives us spiritually insane. If a faith is true, it agrees with the whole Word. The God of the Word, who is the Lord God the Savior, then pours light into that faith, blesses it with his divine assent, and makes us wise.

[4] The modern-day faith (which in its inner form is a faith in three gods, although in its outer form it is a faith in one God) has extinguished the light in the Word and has removed the Lord from the church. It has quickly turned the church's morning into night. (This point too will be seen in the appendix.) The changes in the faith were made by heretics before the Council of Nicaea as well as heretics at the council and after it.

How much trust should we put in councils when they do not use the door to enter the sheepfold? Instead they "climb up some other way," as the Lord says in John 10:1, 9. The debating at those councils was like the walking of a blind person by day or a sighted person by night, each of whom fails to see a great pit before falling into it.

For example, how much trust should we put in councils when they have established the notions of viewing the pope as Christ's representative, deifying dead people, calling on them as supernatural powers, venerating their images, authorizing indulgences, splitting the Eucharist, and more? How much trust should we put in the council that established the horrendous idea of predestination and erected it as a religious icon in front of all church buildings?

Instead, my friend, as you approach the Word, go to the God of the Word and enter the sheepfold of the church through the Door. Then you will be enlightened. Then, as if you were on a mountain top, you will see the earlier tracks and mistaken turns in the dark forest at the foot of the mountain - not only those of many other people, but also your own.