ce . . . Others, however, acquit him of so
crude and almost materialistic a conception, and maintain
that he thought that original sin lay rather in the guilt or
imputability of concupiscence, in so far as, all men being
morally contained in Adam, all human nature being morally
summed up in his, it follows that the whole race of men is
not only subject to concupiscence, but also shares in the
guilt attaching to the existence of concupiscence. As we
have seen, the existence of concupiscence in Adam is to
be imputed to him as a sin, since his rejection of integrity
was sinful. St. Augustine, then, would have it that this guilt
is shared by all men, and constitutes the original sin. 1
Lutherans, furthermore, insisted on the primacy of free grace over merit, that right doctrine must proceed right worship, that salvation is a divine gift (justification by faith), that it must reject the primacy and infallibility of the Pope, and that it sees its Church as one, holy, catholic, apostolic (in the sense that all believers are apostles) and its continuance in the people of God and not as an institution.
The faith of the Lutheran Church is based on the supreme authority of the Bible, the principles of Martin Luther and the Augsburg Confession and Apologia. All its doctrines are conceptions of its one enormous doctrine of justification by faith alone. Faith, which is bestowed through the Word of God in Holy Baptism, is a work of God and not of man; it is an attitude of mind and heart toward God accompanied by conscious, good acts. The Church's faith is also grounded in the inner witness of those believers who, through the quickening power of the Holy
Spirit, are endowed with the proper and right use of the Scriptures, not only as an authority, but as a reference by which believers can evaluate the goodness of other books in the Bible in order to con...