# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 09 06_S3
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

[continued from Seite 2] ...to sober examination, addressed to the Germans in North America, by Fried. Münch, Hermann, Mo., 1845, printed by Mühl and Strehly." This work would probably never have been publicly noticed by me, had not the editor of the "Lutheraner" at St. Louis assured me that it has influence upon the religious disposition of our countrymen in North America. At the urging of my friend, I take upon myself the thankless task of sketching once again, in a few strokes, the untenable and dishonest character of rationalism, which can never satisfy any deeper religious sense that has not yet been enlightened by Christianity.* Although the most gifted men of earlier and later times have already done the very same thing sufficiently, it nevertheless seems necessary in our new homeland to raise one's voice against the above way of thinking, given how low a level of scholarly education most Germans, alas, occupy in this country, and how exposed they are, on that account, to the influence of unscrupulous rationalists. This much is certain: right reflection upon religion must always lead to the ardent hope and the sure faith in a divine revelation; but this occurs in no one whose will is not first inclined to lend an open ear to the truth; the wickedness of the will is the chief reason why so many do not come to the knowledge of the truth. Truth is a thing that not only enlightens the understanding, but at the same time also breaks and changes the will; and whoever recognizes the unholiness and the resistance of his own will already has in that a sure sign that he has been laid hold of, and is being drawn, by the Spirit of truth. May merciful God grant that the present pages contribute something to the healing of our seduced countrymen! That is the heartfelt wish of the writer, and the sole motive for which he comes forward against an unknown person with whom he otherwise surely shares the love of true civil and religious liberty of conscience.

* By rationalism is meant that doctrine according to which all religion, including the Christian religion, is a consequence of the natural development of the human spirit, and according to which, therefore, every alleged extraordinary working of God must be traced back to revelation in nature and reason. A German doctor of theology once explained it thus: "A rationalist is one who thinks that he believes, and believes that he thinks." Cf. the cited work, page 16.

After an introduction designed to arouse attention, Mr. Münch speaks first, with easy popularity, of the Bible and its interpretation in general, and endeavors to undermine the divinity ascribed to it, allowing as its main content only a few natural truths; he then passes, in particular, to the Old Testament, and repeats, notably, the long since ill-fated attempt to distinguish between the teaching of Moses and that of the Lord Jesus (not between Law and Gospel); from there he takes pains to summarize the rationalistic depredations against the canon and text of the New Testament holy books, and, according to modern interpretive art, to give a summary account of their essential content; to which he attaches a brief polemic against evangelical Christology, the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the merit of Jesus, original sin, free will, evil and good spirits (according to the notorious accommodation theory), and hell—not without disorderly distortion—and finally concludes with a presentation of a quintessence of his religious view.

The faultiness of this little book I truly do not lay solely at the author's door; nor am I attacking so much his person as the cause he represents, his teachers whom he unknowingly follows, the tendency of our unbelieving contemporaries, and the poisonous slanders against the sanctities of our Christian faith which they froth forth, and which we, as watchmen called to the battlements of the house of God, are bound, on pain of losing our own salvation, to report in earnest contention. Therefore I ask, from the bottom of my heart, that it be credited to candid frankness if he should feel himself hurt by me; his soul is as precious to me as my own; I am driven by love for the faith of my heroic forefathers; it is German nationhood, German custom, sanctified by Christian virtue, that alone proves itself in the struggle against lies and error. I, too, insist on the right of conscience never to have any opinion forced upon one against a well-founded conviction; and God knows that whoever testifies to the true Christian doctrine in word and deed—whether in America or in the abandoned fatherland—must have made it a matter of conscience. For with no confession is more hindrance, poverty, oppression, and persecution bound up. The spiteful attacks of that little book (p. 3 near the end and following, 14, 16 below) therefore do not touch us.

Since it is not my intention to devote such precious time to each of the individual, superficial assertions that flow from the shameless mass of rationalistic textbooks, I limit myself simply to setting forth the untenability of the principles on which the author relies, since his whole erected edifice must then necessarily collapse, and the loose mortar must crumble away as well.

The author, understanding by the Word of God a book in which divine matters are discussed, subjects the interpretation and understanding of Holy Scripture to imagined difficulties that do not exist at all. His only aim is to make the content of the Bible suspect and ridiculous, as becomes quite plain in what immediately follows. Now, once we have shown that a correct interpretation and understanding is not only possible but actually exists, and have thereupon rescued, against the attacks of the presumptuous unbelievers, the divine authority of Holy Scripture and its mysteries in the proper sense of the word, as well as the miraculous power of almighty God—as the content most offensive to reason, yet so necessary for proving the divine doctrine—then all seeming contradictions in Holy Scripture will resolve themselves, of their own accord, into their proper unity, the more carefully and conscientiously one searches after the truth. It should be carefully noted here, however, that all this jumbled matter, compiled from new handbooks into this little work, has already been advanced against divine truth—with far sharper understanding and wit, and with an altogether different genius—by a Celsus, a Lucian, a Porphyry, a Libanius, enemies of the Christian religion from among the heathen in the most ancient Christian era, and has also long since been refuted more thoroughly than has been possible in the last two centuries. But whatever can be found that is merely incredible has been gathered by the opponents in order to dispute the credibility and the unerring character of the holy Scriptures.

Since the holy books of the Old and New Testament are written in languages whose knowledge is not inaccessible to scholarly diligence, since their authors, according to the strong, full testimony of history, really lived, and one cannot demonstrate on any sure ground that the works constantly ascribed to them did not originate from them,* just as little can the unadulterated authority [continued on Seite 4]

* Would, for example, the Samaritans—who likewise acknowledged the five Books of Moses (whose teaching is only elaborated upon in the remaining books of the Old Testament) as genuine and divine—have accepted them only from an Ezra? That would be exactly as if (I speak by way of comparison) the Evangelicals had had to receive their Augsburg Confession from the Papists; so great, namely, was the disagreement between the Samaritans and the Jews, who nevertheless rightly prided themselves on their tradition. If the five Books of Moses—indeed, even other writings, as rationalistic wisdom teaches—had Ezra, or some other later figure, as their author, would the ancient Jews, who already lived before the Babylonian destruction, have let themselves, after their return from captivity, be sold these same books under a fabricated name? And why, once Moses's writings had supposedly been accepted from Ezra, should the Samaritans not also have accepted the other biblical books? The entire style of writing of the Pentateuch (that is, the five Books of Moses) points to its great antiquity; indeed, Ezra would have acted against every rule of true prudence, and against his own advantage, had he composed something out of old documents rather than laying the documents themselves before his people. But if Moses is the author (and who else could it be?), then he is, on purely human grounds, more credible than any other writer of antiquity, because, owing to his lineage, he could know exactly everything he reported, and, owing to his official dignity and personal qualities, could render it faithfully. On Moses the remaining Old Testament writings are built; on the whole Old Testament, in turn, the books of the New Testament, so that the Pentateuch contains the foundational principles of the Christian religion; they are all linked together, and one stands or falls with the other: if the New Testament is true, then so is the whole Old Testament; for Christ and his apostles rest upon Moses and the Prophets, and confirm them. That the authors of several Old Testament writings (including that of the last chapter of Deuteronomy) did not name themselves is undoubtedly because their sequence made it unnecessary, and the authority of the more famous author overshadowed them; it is enough that we can form highly probable conjectures about them. In general, the historical certainty of the holy books stands so far above that of other writers because: 1) we have consistent reports about them from friends and enemies alike; 2) because the authors betray, in their works, such qualities as make them most venerable to us—namely, their remarkable honesty and simple virtue, their impartial, sincere disposition, their love [continued on Seite 4]