# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 09 29_S9
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

V

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"God's Word and Luther's teaching shall pass away neither now nor ever."

Published by C. F. W. Walther.

St. Louis, Mo., October 4, 1845.

No. 3.

Volume 2.

Terms: Der Lutheraner appears once every two weeks, at a subscription price of one dollar for out-of-town subscribers, who must prepay half of this amount and bear the cost of postage. — In St. Louis, each single issue is sold for 5 cents.

(Submitted by Pastor O. Fürbringer.)

Rationalism and the Bible.
(Continued.)

Since this is so, my beloved reader, and since I would venture, should it be required, to defend and establish all this yet more fully, you see how all difficulties in understanding holy Scripture, and all obstacles to its correct interpretation, fall away of themselves — inasmuch as I am convinced only of this: that Scripture is God's Word in the proper sense (1 Thess. 2:13), given by God to the prophets and apostles in a manner incomprehensible to us (1 Tim. 3:16), and that with God nothing is impossible that does not run contrary to His very nature (Luke 1:37). I then hold fast to the words as God speaks them to me, He who gives them to me as a lamp to my feet and a light on my life's journey (Ps. 119:105); I receive them with humility, with a childlike, believing, and obedient disposition, and leave it to God to clarify the things that seem impossible or irreconcilable, while I adoringly marvel at the mystery of His ways, without wishing to measure the infinite Godhead — which throughout all eternity will keep hidden within itself glories far beyond my understanding — or to extend myself from my own small sphere up to it. (Compare, by contrast, 2 Pet. 3:16.) When I have already felt in my heart the divine wisdom and grace, the truth and goodness, of the higher revelation, then I have the joyful confidence that even what is incomprehensible, or known only in part, will correspond to the heavenly rule. To lead you now to this conviction — that Scripture is what it claims to be, that a divine origin and a divine authority belong to it — that is now the task at hand. Do not let it vex you to follow my thoughts and their presentation closely and attentively; the goal, the outcome, will reward you.

Consider yourself, O mortal, in your whole constitution of soul and body, as it presents itself to you through sensory perception, and likewise the whole of nature around you: then you find that you, together with it, are dependent upon a higher power. In the innermost part of your spirit, an accusing and excusing voice accompanies your actions, for which you expect retribution from the highest Being — a Being whose attributes and perfections are inconceivable to you. In all your striving after "morality, uprightness, and sincere love," you always feel imperfection and a lack of these, indeed contradictions throughout your whole being: that you often do what you yourself do not wish, that you have inclinations, desires, and aspirations toward what is higher, and yet your heart is chained to temporal goods and honor, etc., etc.; you recognize that you stand in no right relationship to your God, and you lack the true rest of your soul, the inestimable peace of conscience. All this is a firmly established experience among men of every nation, however deep a level of culture they may occupy; hence the manifold attempts to reconcile the deity. Even among the most virtuous heathen we hear complaints* that surprise us. Indeed, the more zealously you strive after perfection, the further you find yourself from the goal; you fall into terror over your helpless condition, like a man who has lost himself in a wilderness; and no means appears to you in the whole mute universe to tell you what you should do to save yourself from an agonizing uncertainty.

*) See the remarkable saying of Crantor, in Plutarch, Consolation to Apollonius, VI, 396: "When we come into being, a thoroughly evil portion is mixed in with us; for the seed, which is mortal from the start, shares the same cause from which the natural inadequacy of the soul, sicknesses and heartache, and the lot of mortals steal upon us." Seneca, De Clementia I, 6: "How many judges are there who are not themselves bound by the same law by which they judge? How many accusers are free of guilt? And I do not know whether the one hardest to bring to forgiveness is not always the one who has more often deserved to ask for it. We have all erred — some more, others less; some deliberately, others perhaps carried away or led astray by another's malice; some of us have stood all too little firm in good resolutions, and have lost our blamelessness against our will and with reluctance. And we not only have failed, but shall go on failing to the very end of our lives." Juvenal, Satire XIII, verse 108 and following: "These punishments are suffered by the mere will to sin; for whoever silently harbors a shameful deed within himself is as guilty as if he had committed it. Behold: once he has given sin its will, the ever-present anxious fear does not leave him even at mealtime."

You recognize that every gift has a giver, and thus that every good and perfect gift has a good and perfect giver; you thus arrive at the origin of all good, at the highest good, that is, God. Only in possessing, in union with, the highest good can you be truly and eternally blessed. Your own continuance after death is assured to you precisely by the innate, ineradicable longing for a true and lasting happiness that you do not find on earth. Your life is subject to disturbing change and to an end that truly portends punishment rather than future blessing. In what state, then, must your soul find itself after death, if you cannot become a partaker of the highest good? What will become of you in death, when you die only to go forth to meet the retribution that your conscience proclaims to you for eternity?

"Yes," you say, "but how do you prove to me that I am not in possession of the highest good, in union with God — that I lack the purity, the righteousness, needed to enjoy God?" Well, your own experience proves this to you. It is love that inclines two beings toward one another; but in your heart fear reigns — for what else is it but fear that sends a shudder through your innermost soul at the thought of death, eternity, and its judgment? And does your knowledge of God reach far enough to plant love within you? But can fear — fear that acts out of servile compulsion — really take the place of love, of voluntary love? Can the purest Being establish a friendly intercourse and fellowship with a creature full of sinful pride, the Most Holy with the unholy?

Nothing remains, then, but that you are destined either to an eternal separation from God — that is, to damnation (for if God created us after His own likeness, as the rationalist himself concedes, then man is eternally restless, in unheard-of torment, once he must do without the earth, without yet resting in God with his spirit) — or that God has had mercy on you and on all your wretched fellow men, and has revealed to you the way by which you can come to Him and become eternally blessed in fellowship with Him. That the latter is more probable than the former is to be assumed of the best of beings. We may therefore seek God, in whom we live and move and have our being, to see whether we can indeed feel and find Him. But where shall I seek God? Where shall I seek God