# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 08 03_S99
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— Church; but insofar as it perverts the truth, it is a sect, and not an institution for salvation, but a foundation of the devil for the seduction and eternal ruin of the redeemed. If we say, for example, that the Roman Church is not the Church of Christ but a sect, we are considering it as the papal hierarchy, in view of the abuses, errors, and idolatrous forms of worship through which it has caused a schism within the Christian Church; but by this we do not deny that, even within the Roman Catholic sect, the Church — that is, children of God — lies hidden, who are spiritual priests, and for whose sake, therefore, the keys of the kingdom of heaven are also administered within the Roman Church; that valid calling and ordination, valid baptism, valid administration of the Holy Supper, valid absolution and excommunication — in short, all the rights and full powers of the Church — can be validly exercised there.*)

*) It was therefore with astonishment that we read in the "Christian Journal" the report that the General Assembly (Old School) of the Presbyterian Church recently, in Cincinnati, gave, by an overwhelming majority, the — to put it most gently — exceedingly rash, but in fact highly sectarian decision: "that baptism administered by Roman Catholic priests is not valid." This error Luther already had to combat 300 years ago against the Anabaptists. He writes about this, among other places, as follows (vol. XVII, 2607ff.): "I say that under the Pope there is the true Christendom, indeed the very flower of Christendom, and many pious, great saints. — Now if the Pope (as I cannot but believe) is truly the Antichrist, then he ought not to sit or rule in the devil's stable, but in God's temple. — And because he is to sit and rule there, he must have Christians under him. — We do not rage as the factious spirits do, so as to reject everything that the Pope has under him. — Therefore the talk of such Anabaptists and fanatics amounts to nothing when they say: whatever the Pope has is wrong; or, because this or that happens under the papacy, we want to have it otherwise. — But they do just as one brother did to another in the Thuringian forest: they were walking together through the forest, and a bear attacked them and threw one of them down; then the other wished to help his brother, struck at the bear, but missed his aim, and pitiably stabbed his brother to death under the bear. Just so do the fanatics also. They ought to help poor Christendom, which the Antichrist holds under him and torments, but instead they set themselves up horribly against the Pope, miss their aim, and murder Christendom under the Pope far more pitiably. For if they had left baptism and the sacrament intact, Christians might still have escaped with their souls under the Pope, and been saved, as has happened until now. But now that the sacraments are taken from them, they must indeed be lost, because Christ himself is thereby taken away as well. Dear friend, one ought not simply to lash out at the Pope in this way, because Christ's saints lie hidden under him. It requires a cautious, modest spirit, one that lets remain under him whatever is God's temple, and resists his additions, lest he destroy the temple of God." — This is the correct way of viewing the Roman Church. Mr. Nollau turns it upside down: he takes the hierarchical organism (the papal system) to be the form of the Church, and takes the destruction of that organism to be the downfall of the Church!

—

All this naturally holds true as well of the Reformed, Evangelical, Methodist, and other religious fellowships. When we call these sects, and deny to them that they are true churches and institutions of salvation, we say this of them insofar as they have separated themselves from the true Church, and have constituted themselves distinctly, through their false doctrine. We maintain that the Reformed church, etc., as a Reformed church, is not a part of the true Church of Christ, for as such it is not a pillar of the truth, but a pillar and foundation of soul-endangering errors. In saying this, however, we by no means deny that, as under this fellowship, so also under all other heterodox fellowships, the true Church lies hidden. Mr. N. therefore errs greatly when he supposes it to be a contradiction to maintain that the sects are not institutions of salvation, and yet to concede that much good remains in them, through which many souls are still saved. Let Mr. N. take note that there is a great difference between considering the sect as such, according to its essential nature, and considering it according to its (in the philosophical sense) accidental properties. As a sect, none of them is an institution of salvation or a true church, although the true Church may lie hidden within it. When, therefore, Mr. Nollau writes on page 24, in the sweet consciousness of having refuted us: "We hope our opponents will, for their own good, yet humbly recognize such a sorrowful error and be put to shame," we must inform Mr. N. that he has rejoiced too soon; our assertion still stands firm, but it is now Mr. N.'s turn to recognize and confess his error, although we would gladly see him spared the shame he wished upon us.

That the heterodox fellowships have always been viewed by the orthodox, according to God's Word, in no other way than we do — namely in a twofold manner, as sects, and as fellowships beneath which the Church lies hidden — for this we now wish to adduce some important testimonies.

When Luther rejects the Roman Church, he teaches that one must make a distinction, and says: "But by the word 'Roman Church' you must by no means understand the true Roman Church, especially the one that existed before the papacy, which did not want to accept or tolerate the papacy, as we have heard in the case of Gregory; and no doubt Christ still has some sons and daughters in the Roman Sodom to whom the abominable nature of the papacy is displeasing. Rather, you must understand it in the papistic, roguish, and devilish sense: that the Pope uses the name of the holy Roman Church in the most shameful and blasphemous manner, and means by it his own school of knaves, his church of harlots and hermaphrodites, the devil's basic broth." (XVII, 1318.)

In other passages, Luther accordingly makes the following confessions concerning the papists: "I confess that the church in which you sit derives from the ancient church, just as we do, and has that same baptism, as well as the sacraments, the keys, and the texts of the Bible and the Gospels; I will praise you even more highly, and confess that we have received everything from the church that exists among you (not from you). We do not consider you to be like Turks or Jews, who are outside the church; rather, we say that you do not remain faithful to it, and you become the runaway, apostate, whorish church (as the prophets are accustomed to call it), which does not remain in the church out of which it was born and raised." (XVII, 1673.) — "Well then, the Pope says that he is the Christian Church; to that we say no — although there are indeed some under the papacy who belong to the Christian Church, just as also among the Turks, in France and in England, there are many who belong to the Christian Church; they are baptized, hold to the Gospel, use the sacraments rightly, and are true Christians. But that they now condemn us and say our doctrine is not right, and instead whitewash themselves and justify themselves by their own laws, etc., saying that whoever keeps these is a true Christian and is the true Christian Church — to that we say no. This much we do grant, and let it stand, that they are within the Christian church, but they are not the rightful members of the Church." (VII, 2343.)

Luther makes similar confessions regarding the other, more recent sects. He says, among other things: "We must indeed confess that the fanatics have Scripture and God's Word in other articles, and whoever hears and believes it from them will be saved, although they themselves are unholy heretics and blasphemers of Christ." (XVII, 2675.) Elsewhere: "Therefore the Church is holy everywhere, even in those places where the fanatics and factious spirits rule, so long as they do not entirely deny and reject the Word and the Sacrament. For those who deny these things wholly and entirely are no longer a church at all. But where Word and Sacrament remain essentially intact, there a holy church also remains. But Jews, Turks, fanatics, and factious spirits or heretics are not the Church, for these deny and destroy such things." (VIII, 1591-92.)

From all this the Christian reader now sees that when we Lutherans reject certain Christian parties as sects, we do not thereby mean the Church that also lies hidden beneath these sects, but rather the false doctrine and its stubborn and obstinate defenders, who are to blame for the fact that the Church is, and remains, divided. We by no means condemn entire Christian parties, still less the poor deceived people within them, who err out of simplicity and do not (unlike the false prophets who lead them astray) blaspheme the truth, nor hate, revile, and persecute the orthodox; as indeed this is clearly attested in the preface to the symbolical books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Now that we have inserted this demonstration of what position the heterodox fellowships occupy within Christendom, we come to our concluding question: What does it mean that the Lutheran Church is the true catholic (universal) Church of Jesus Christ on earth, and why do we claim this high dignity for it?

To this we answer: the Lutheran Church is not the visible totality of those who call themselves Lutheran, but rather the great, unchangeable Church to which those rightly called Lutherans confess themselves by their doctrine — the Church to which millions of souls belonged before Luther's name was ever spoken in the world, souls who therefore did not bear the name Lutheran. A particular congregation or a national church in which the Lutheran doctrine is preached and accepted is therefore a Lutheran church, but not the Lutheran Church; for this latter is scattered throughout the whole world, wherever that same faith is found. We therefore gladly and wholeheartedly admit that the sum total of all those who have hitherto rightly called themselves Lutheran is only a particular church, and not the catholic Christian Church, but only a part of it,*) but the Church to which all these alone confess themselves is no particular church subject to downfall, but the unchangeable, eternal, catholic Christian Church, a "pillar and ground of the truth." The Lutherans therefore confess themselves to the Lutheran Church not in the way the Evangelicals confess themselves to the Evangelical church, which they hold to as supposedly the best Christian party. The Lutherans, by their name, confess themselves to no party, but to the one, ancient, universal Church, and therefore, of course, also to all those individual congregations which, as a part of this universal Church, manifest themselves through their orthodox confession.

But why, one will now object to us—

*) This alone is what the "worthy, strictly Lutheran theologian" mentioned by Mr. N. on page 7 of his tract has conceded in the words quoted. He was far from wishing to belong to any other than the universal Christian Church.