# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 11 01_S19
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

…much caring to ask what the new member believes; and likewise, congregations here also accept preachers so long as they have at most some certificate of scholarship, a good gift of gab, and a good voice, but they do not ask about their faith. How far things have come indeed! And where will it yet lead?

It has therefore given us great joy to read, in the Lutheran Kirchen-Zeitung from Pittsburgh, an announcement by its editor, the dear Rev. P. Schmidt, telling how matters stand on the points mentioned above in his congregations. We cannot refrain from reprinting this notice here, for the encouragement of other congregations. Rev. P. Schmidt writes as follows:

"An important question for every Evangelical Lutheran congregation in the United States to which the pure, unadulterated doctrine of the church is still dear, precious, and valuable, is this: how can our congregation be secured against the intrusion of false, erring teachers, since our synods give us no protection in this regard through binding their preachers to the confessions of our church?

The congregations in Pittsburgh, Allegheny, and Boston have solved this question in a simple way: in each of these congregations, preachers and members must sign a declaration upon their admission; the declaration of the Boston congregation reads as follows:

"'We, the undersigned, members of the German Evangelical Lutheran congregation in Boston, hereby confess before God and our conscience that we regard the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the revealed Word of God. We will see to it that the same is always preached purely in our congregation on the foundation of the apostles and prophets and according to the guidance of the unaltered Augsburg Confession and the other symbolical books of our church, namely: the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, the Smalcald Articles, the two catechisms of Luther, and the Formula of Concord; we ourselves will persevere in this faith of our fathers until our end — God grant it! Amen.'

This declaration must be signed not only by every member entitled to communion — man, wife, son, daughter, manservant, or maidservant — but also by the preacher upon entering his office. The preacher thereby receives the free confidence to preach the full doctrine of the church without reservation and to testify against sectarians with the sharpness of the Word; the members of the congregation receive a guarantee against the intrusion of false preaching."

(Submitted by Pastor O. Fürbringer.)

Rationalism and the Bible.
(Continued.)

Now that we have in this way kept our promise, so far as lay within our power,

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have shown in brief outline the good cause of Christian doctrine as well as the groundlessness of rationalism, it only remains for us to give some attention to certain particulars in Mr. Münch's writing which might perhaps present the greatest difficulty to the inexperienced reader. Everything else will resolve itself for a believing reader of the Bible. — (see p. [Pfg.]) Moses — whose alleged converse with God could not have been a deception, as was the case with Pythagoras or the ancient Roman king Numa, partly because of the greatness and sublimity of his teaching and the hard yoke of his laws, and partly because we find nowhere even the slightest trace of such invented converse, as we do with those men — this Moses stands so little in contradiction with his Master, Jesus Christ, that on the contrary the most beautiful harmony and accord is to be found between the two. Apart from the fact that all the extensive ordinances concerning worship and civil life which Moses, at God's command, gave to the Israelites — a theocracy, in the expression of the Jewish historian Josephus — contained now a deeper spiritual sense and meaning for the messianic age (compare the Epistle to the Hebrews), now the application of natural law to time and place, the sermon of the Lord Jesus on the mountain in Galilee, in chapters 5–7 of St. Matthew, is the clearest exposition of the meaning of the Mosaic teaching. Compare John 5:46; Acts 7:35ff.; Hebrews 11:24ff.; Galatians 3:10–14; Mark 12:24f., 28f. with Deuteronomy 6:5; 33:3; Leviticus 19:8 (Romans 12:20 with Proverbs 25:21f. — 1 Samuel 16:7). And why should we not believe Moses that God frequently appeared in human form? Why should God not be able to appear to men as a man, since in the fullness of time he bled, suffered, and died for them as a man? Jacob's wrestling match with him is confirmed as fact in Hosea 12:4f. As for the human manner of speaking about God, one must be careful not to make one's eyes so clear that in the end, from sheer clarity, they see nothing at all; God does not wish to be grasped in sharp metaphysical abstractions, by which he is thought without any likeness and thereby stripped of every imperfect image of himself, but rather in humanly concrete conceptions that are fruitful for life. To this must be added that the oldest languages, having in general more and bolder images, go even further than the languages of the modern West in such figures of speech, although the latter, too, cannot do without them entirely. Ah, how the enemies distort the God of the people of Israel, how they twist and misconstrue his words and ways, misunderstand his holy law, how they mock the judgments of his hand! To the perverse he shows himself perverse (Psalm 18:27); he walks contrary to them and gives them over to a blinded mind, so that they cannot see the bright light of his divine Word. As many as receive him, to them he gives power to become children of God, even to those who believe in his name; but those who do not recognize the time of their visitation, and do not consider what serves their peace, will, like that unhappy people, be cast out of his kingdom. Israel's calling as preacher to the idolatrous rest of the world became its own downfall, and a light to the Gentiles (Isaiah 60).*) To the pure, everything they read in the Word of God likewise serves for ever higher purification; but to the impure and unbelieving nothing is pure, for both their mind and conscience are unclean (Titus 1:15). It is a testimony to the utmost integrity of the sacred writers that what becomes a snare and a stumbling block to those who love error is this: that they set forth not only the weaknesses but the deepest sinful falls of holy persons — even their own — as warning examples, and join what is base and human, in their divinely inspired style, to the pen of the Holy Spirit. — We now turn to the New Testament. (see p. 9f.)

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*) Nothing proves the truth and divinity of Holy Scripture almost more strongly than the remarkable course of this people through world history. A people remarkable for its origin — for all other peoples gather themselves out of countless families, but this one descends from a single one; remarkable for the age of its writings — for among all the remaining relics of antiquity, none is found older than the five books of Moses (that work put forward by some enemies of Christianity as older, the history-book of the Phoenician Sanchuniathon, bears in itself the marks of a later origin, since in its description of creation it repeatedly follows in the footsteps of Moses, veiling them in obscure poetic accounts, etc., for which reason its reports have actually served Christians to great advantage; indeed, it is not even established, as Johann Albert Fabricius reports, whether its translator in the time of Emperor Hadrian was not also the author of the whole work); remarkable for the prophecies and promises of a Messiah given to it, whose heralds they were to be for the other nations; remarkable for its separation from all these others in matters of worship and custom; remarkable for the changes in its fortunes, which always corresponded to its faithfulness or unfaithfulness toward the laws of Moses; remarkable for its splendor under King David and Solomon; remarkable for its endurance, which continues uninterrupted to this very day, while many later peoples have long since vanished without a trace, and the mightiest kings of the earth had intended its destruction; remarkable for the fulfillment of Christ's prophecy, Luke 21:21, whose truth the present day still bears out; remarkable for its entanglement with the history of the greatest empires and most eminent nations and its influence upon the heathen world, as well as for its being a model for the education of the whole human race: — such a people rightly makes the most well-founded claims to the universal calling of being the bearer of a divine revelation, and it is therefore worth the trouble to consider it more closely.