# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 09 29_S10
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

to find rest for my soul, wearied by the distractions of life, and the nourishment that my immortal spirit needs? How do I distinguish His true revelation from deceptive religions that falsely make the same claim? The matter is easy, as soon as I hold fast only to that for which revelation must have been given to me.

That revelation which shows me, in a manner throughout befitting the highest divine majesty, the sole means and the way of being brought into His fellowship, where His love and His inviolable justice are both revealed to me, equally great and glorious; a revelation which, for historical reasons, is as firm as the ground on which we stand, as old as the human race itself, whose giving, preservation, and safekeeping — in the very midst, since the time of Abraham, of the darkest abominations of idolatry, through an incomprehensible propagation and spread by the humblest instruments despite the most powerful resistance — displays its divinity in the most unmistakable way; a revelation confirmed beyond contradiction by connected prophetic predictions over the course of millennia and by the wonderful agreement of the Old and New Testaments, and sealed by the blood of so many witnesses to the truth who, separated from one another by centuries, always confessed one and the same experience; a revelation clothed in so lovely a majesty, simplicity, and power of language that it is able, even in the crudest sinner and the most hardened unbelieving heart — provided that heart does not, with willful courage, resist its own conscience — to move it, to touch it, and to free it from the most deeply rooted filth of vice: such a revelation can have none but God Himself for its author. And such a revelation has been given to me in the Bible, and has always been acknowledged as such by the wisest and noblest of our race.

To pursue this condensed line of argument for the truth of the scriptural religion and the divinity of the Bible generally down into its particulars, and, through diligent prayer, study, and reflection, to fortify it against the gates of hell, is indeed not a task for the common man; yet he is directed by the church father Origen** to the one thing that here settles the matter,

**) See his work Contra Celsum, I, 2: "Tell me which of the two is better: that believers changed their ways and bettered their lives by believing, without exact investigation, that sins are to expect punishment and good deeds a reward; or that they delayed their conversion until they had not only believed this but had also carefully investigated the grounds for it. If one wished to choose this latter path, certainly few would arrive at that to which their wholly simple and unadorned faith leads them, but most would remain stuck fast in their ruin." He himself explains the former by the heart-guiding power of the Spirit. Compare the account from the history of the Council of Nicaea in these pages, Volume I, No. 1. A famous freethinker of quite keen understanding was brought to the Christian faith solely by the story of the conversion of the apostle Paul, Acts 9, which he happened once to read.

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namely, to the spiritual experience of the power of the Word through faith itself — as the proof which is indeed the strongest, surpassing the bodily senses in certainty, and which renders all others superfluous. It is called, in a beautiful expression of Christian doctrine, the testimony of the Holy Spirit. (Rom. 8:16; 10:1, 16. 1 John 5:6. Acts; Heb. 4:12. 1 Pet. 1:23. John 6:63; 7:16f. Jer. 33:29. Ps. 19:8-9.) Here there is no question of any enthusiasm that draws hasty conclusions from unintelligible fancies and becomes entangled in fanatical errors; but rather of a sure, infallible, clear, and distinct consciousness of having been transferred from death into life, from the bondage of sin into freedom and righteousness, from darkness into light — an experience which in every respect is grounded on a written Word, revealed to the whole world. It is the believer's own inward, spiritual judgment of faith (John 4:42; 6:68f.): I believe, because through faith I have come to know — impressed firmly upon the foundation of the soul by the righteousness of God, which comes from faith to faith (Rom. 1:17), to the exclusion of all human merit, the sealing by the Spirit of truth, a bright light shining into the dark heart (2 Cor. 1:22; 4:6. John 3:33; 14:26).

Even for a scholar, this testimony is indispensable, just as the eye is indispensable to a traveler for finding his way home. The eternal love of God toward deeply fallen mankind, the voluntary self-surrender of the Lord Jesus unto death, the unexpected mercy shown to so many millions of rebellious hearts — what great, manifold, inexpressible feelings (whether with or without perceptible emotion) must penetrate a soul that does not harden itself! How could the power of sin possibly withstand this, so that its strongest chains would not burst asunder! Here it is not a matter of reckoning things tangibly or of drawing slow geometric conclusions (as a certain mathematical genius among the French himself has said) — one would lose the greatness of the thought. Overwhelmed by the immense power of grace, you will plead on your knees in the dust: O Jesus, Sun of Righteousness, have mercy on me! And it will be given to you to understand the mysteries of the kingdom of God, and to gaze with open eyes into the rays of the eternal and incomprehensible Godhead, softened for us through the humanity of Jesus Christ.

What does a blind man understand of color, a drunken man of lovely poetry — how can I perceive the sun if I willfully cover my own face? What does a rationalist understand of the wealth of comfort in the Gospel and of the divine teachings revealed therein? Thus it happens, of course, that even the author of that little tract takes offense at the mystery of the Holy Trinity and the incarnation of the Son of God. (1 Tim. 3:16.) I am seized with revulsion when I read his words on this on page 11. Does he not sense the deep, holy truth on which his baptismal covenant was concluded? Does he trample underfoot the precious mysteries that bring the wondrous God so near to us out of the darkness of immeasurable hiddenness, while yet preserving the idea of His unfathomable divine life? The mysteries of the Christian religion meet the needs of the human spirit in its highest developments; for in the nobler philosophical systems we find, alongside much else, misunderstood echoes of biblical revelation. Foreign to the rationalist is the idea — one that even a Plato already had — of being released from above from the unhappy fetters of sin and becoming a partaker of a virtue worked by God; blinded, he ascribes, like the Turk, to man's own strength the earning of heaven through good works. Foreign to him is the thought of a God who sustains creation in living, all-effecting activity, and the deep yearning to have the eternal source, unreachable in itself, unfold itself, as it were, so that it might come nearer to the finite beings who need it — as we read so beautifully in Augustine, the church father (from which it is explicable how polytheism, or the worship of many gods, could find such acceptance). He imagines to himself, in cold indifference like his own, a being behind the clouds who has wound up a dead clockwork of natural laws, so that, while the creating hands remain bound to it, it might run down in idle contemplation. Foreign and foolish to him therefore is — as indeed it is to all human wisdom left to itself — the sole ground of a reasonable worship of God (Rom. 12:1): the restoration of the torn bond of love and trust, of the true veneration of God, whereby one, untroubled about the past, can be full of confident hope and joy toward God for the present and future. He is himself, whether in fearful hypocrisy or false security, his own mediator and reconciler, and lets God deal with His grace so carelessly and wastefully, at the cost of His holy majesty and sovereign right, that he supposes God ought to overlook the outrageous sin of men who daily and repeatedly offend His honor with so little regard, who mock His declared law with such impudent contempt, indeed who grievously afflict the highest good through the disgrace done it by their love of the creature — and that He should forgive it without satisfaction, without the satisfaction to which natural law itself nonetheless admonishes the conscience. He denies any influence, any working of the most high Spirit of love upon the rational soul through the Word given by Him, and considers it fanaticism, because he prefers to live for himself and his selfish impulses in the freedom of a carnal disposition. Precisely that which fills the Christian with the most reverent devotion toward the Bible, and which most clearly stamps it with the mark of a divine origin — namely, that it reveals mysteries so lofty, so worthy of the exalted