43. 8 This faith is faith in God the Savior Jesus Christ. In a simple form it is this:

1. There is one God, the divine trinity exists within him, and he is the Lord Jesus Christ.

2. Believing in him is a faith that saves.

3. We must abstain from doing things that are evil — they belong to the Devil and come from the Devil.

4. We must do things that are good — they belong to God and come from God.

5. We must do these things as if we ourselves were doing them, but we must believe that they come from the Lord working with us and through us.

21. 3 The leading reformers — Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin — retained all the dogmas regarding the trinity of persons in the Divine, original sin, the assigning of Christ’s merit to us, and our being justified by faith, in the same past and present form they had had among Roman Catholics. The reformers separated goodwill or good works from that faith, however, and declared that our good works contribute nothing to our salvation, for the purpose of clearly differentiating themselves from Roman Catholics with regard to the essentials of the church, which are faith and goodwill.