# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1846 04 18_S65
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheraner.

"God's Word and Luther's teaching shall now and forevermore endure."

Edited by C. F. W. Walther.

Year 2.

St. Louis, Mo., April 18, 1846.

No. 17.

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

(Submitted by Dr. Sihler.)
What Were Evangelicals, and What Are Evangelicals?

At the time of the Reformation, those were called, and were, Evangelicals in whom the following signs and marks were found:

1) They submitted themselves simply and sincerely, without hypocrisy or reservation, to the entire Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testament, and especially to its pure, unfalsified doctrine of salvation, as this doctrine had from ancient times been confessed in the holy Christian Church, particularly also against false teachers and those of false belief.

2) Accordingly, they also submitted themselves to the three most important testimonies and confessions of the evangelical-apostolic mother church, namely the Apostles', Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds — the latter two of which further interpret and more precisely define the first, on the basis of Holy Scripture, against godless and subversive false doctrines. —

3) By this submission — that is, by the free joint confession of this same precious truth of salvation — they thereby testified to their unity of faith and doctrine with the orthodox (rightly-believing), catholic (universal) Church of the first centuries, before the rise of the papacy and its lies and errors. —

4) With holy earnestness and zeal, and at the risk of goods and blood, they maintained and defended the pure, unadulterated doctrine of salvation, and especially that concerning the sole valid merit of Christ and its appropriation by faith in the preaching of the Gospel and in the Holy Sacraments, against Papists and fanatics.

5) They did not presume, out of human conceit, to regard the scriptural doctrine of the Holy Sacraments as a secondary doctrine, being well aware that it constitutes half of the truth of salvation for the appropriation of Christ and His merit, and that it is a mighty dam and bulwark against Anabaptists, sacramentarian fanatics, and other fickle and factious spirits.

6) They continually exercised the office of watchman and witness over the pure Word and Sacrament, and formed no fellowship or union with those who rejected both by turning Holy Baptism and the Lord's Supper into empty, contentless signs and pictures.*) For they well knew that a true union was possible only if the party opposed to them would abandon its fanatical false doctrine concerning the Holy Sacraments, and likewise concerning the office of the keys and other matters, and would enter into the orthodox scriptural doctrine as it had, moreover, been held in the evangelical apostolic Church from the beginning.

*) And yet a part of these Reformed in Switzerland and Upper Germany had already accepted the Wittenberg Concord of 1536, and had thereby in fact testified to their agreement with the pure sacramental doctrine of the Evangelical, Lutheran confession — but later fell away from it again.

"Evangelicals," however (or Protestants, or the United churches), are now, and are so called, in a time of a sentiment-believing, over-busy, immature, feverish, confession-averse, and fanatical Christianity, those in whom the following signs and marks are found:

1) They do not submit themselves simply and sincerely, without hypocrisy or reservation, to the entire Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testament, and especially to its pure and unfalsified doctrine of salvation, despite every appearance of such submission — as this insincerity shall be demonstrated in what follows.

2) Accordingly, neither do they submit themselves to those three most important confessions of the apostolic mother church, which victoriously maintain the pure evangelical truth of salvation outwardly against those of false belief and false teachers, and develop it ever more definitely inwardly. For one part of today's Evangelicals (such as, for example, those in the Rhenish Palatinate) disdains all ecclesiastical confession, willfully cuts itself off from the trunk of the evangelical-apostolic mother church, and voluntarily takes its place beside the fanatical and factious spirits who do the same — and indeed under the appearance and pretense that this willfulness and frivolity is proper reverence toward God's Word, and that the confession of the Church would set itself alongside, or even above, Holy Scripture. Another part of the so-called Evangelicals or United churches (as, for example, in Prussia) does not, indeed, reject all ecclesiastical confession outright, but is indifferent in this matter and holds that the Lutherans and the Reformed could, of course, keep their particular ecclesiastical symbols, yet could nevertheless join together on account of their manifold agreement, and forget their disputed doctrines. More on this later; here, briefly, only this much: that the truth of the accusation in No. 1 already follows from this. — For it is impossible that, in the doctrines of the Holy Sacraments, the confessional writings of both the Lutheran and the Reformed Church should be equally subject to the words of institution of the Lord Jesus Christ in Holy Scripture; and it is then also evident that only the Lutheran Church submits to these words as they read, and possesses and holds fast to the kernel and marrow of the matter, whereas the Reformed Church, on the contrary, substitutes a figurative sense for these words and contents itself with the husk and shell of the matter. How, then, can there be, among the so-called Evangelicals of today, a true, unfeigned reverence for the Word of God — which, after all, cannot possibly be both figurative and literal in one and the same matter — when they regard this mighty contradiction in the doctrine of the Lutherans and the Reformed as nothing, and regard union, despite it, as nevertheless possible, indeed as beautiful and desirable, because, after all, they agree in other articles! If one does not honor the Word of God at one point — especially where solemn institutions and essential means of grace of the Son of God are concerned — and is indifferent as to whether the sense is literal or figurative, that is, whether the heavenly gift is truly present in the earthly means or not, then it would be hard to prove that a pure, sincere submission to the whole Word of God is present. —

3) They are far from defending, as the Evangelicals of old, the fellow confessors of Luther, did — the pure, undimmed truth of salvation at the risk of goods and blood, both against the Papists and against the fanatics. For either they are lukewarm and lazy in this — and given their insecure, uncertain foundation there can be no courage of true churchly confession in their veins — or they contend more carnally than spiritually against the Papists; but toward the sacramentarian fanatics they are quite peaceably disposed, indeed for the most part they are, inwardly, quite cordially at one with them; for in the doctrines of the Holy Sacraments they are, more or less