# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1846 04 18_S67
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

[illegible — stray running-head fragment]

human commandment and authority, allow ourselves to be driven to no act or omission that God has neither commanded nor forbidden, but has left free to us? How much more should we do this where a definite, clear Word of God and the simple understanding of faith have existed from the beginning of the Christian Church down to the errors of the Papists and fanatics? Is it not plainly a sin against the triune God if someone here, out of human regard, gives away something of divine truth? And whoever becomes a friend of men in this way — is he not an enemy of God? Does not the Lord Christ say, "the word that I have spoken will judge you on the last day"? And did He not also speak the word, "Take, eat, this is my body"? Indeed, will this word not judge you in your hour of death, if you thoughtlessly and willfully cast it aside, or maintain church fellowship with those who do not believe it as it reads?

In the second place, my dear fellow believer, you also break your vow of faithfulness to your church if you enter into, or remain in, such fellowship. For even granting that, unfortunately, many of its ministers and teachers are, some of them, altogether unbelieving and teach falsely, while others are perhaps attached to the fanatical counter-doctrine concerning the Holy Sacraments and instruct erroneously in it, our Church — the Church of the pure Word and Sacrament — does not thereby fall. For it does not stand on the faith of many or few teachers and hearers, nor does it fall with their unbelief; rather, in all the articles of its confession and doctrine, it stands upon the pure Word of God in the Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testament, and it testifies to this its standing and foundation unanimously also in its confessional writings, from the Augsburg Confession to the Formula of Concord; and finally, even in the time of its deepest decline, when it was terribly corrupted by rationalism, or the religion of reason, it has always had its 7,000 who did not bend their knees before any Baal of reason, and who remained faithful to the pure Word of God and to the witness of its doctrine of salvation, as, for example, is already contained in the Small Lutheran Catechism. And behold! Already in this brief summary of the truth of salvation, in this precious legacy of that dear man of God, you also now have an excellent treasure, a shield and sword against all kinds of fanatical and fickle spirits who, for instance, cast doubt on Holy Baptism for you, and a firm, correct understanding of faith in all those points of Christian doctrine that are useful and necessary to a Christian for the soul's salvation. Therefore remain with your church, your spiritual mother, who bore and raised you, even though, unfortunately, many a hireling, thief, murderer, and false prophet is still, through God's wrath, found among her servants. If you once helped, through your own unbelief, to lay her waste, and were perhaps the (spiritually) dead young man of Nain — then do not depart from her, if the voice of the Lord Jesus has awakened you from wherever, and has brought you to faith; remain with her, and now help, as a faithful son, to build her up and plant her.

In the third place, you, a Lutheran, sin also precisely against those with whom you enter into church fellowship against the confession of your church, whether they be Reformed, or already so-called Evangelicals, or Protestants. For you help to strengthen them in the godless and reckless delusion that the doctrine of the Holy Sacraments is really a secondary doctrine, whose divergence does not hinder union, and that the very same words of institution of the Lord Jesus Christ — with and in which He institutes and establishes Holy Baptism and the Lord's Supper — could be simultaneously literal and figurative, and correct in two, indeed opposite, ways at once. For the Church of the Lutheran Confession believes the Lord Jesus at His word, and holds, confesses, and teaches that in and by means of the water the grace of regeneration, and in and by means of the bread and wine His body and blood, given and shed for us, are essentially and truly given and received; but the Reformed do not believe the Lord Jesus at His word, and imagine and maintain that water, bread, and wine are merely outward signs and images, which do not essentially and truly contain in themselves the heavenly gift signified and pictured, so that it is not given and received in them and by means of them.

How, then, is it possible that our faith and our holding fast to the words of institution of the Lord Jesus Christ, as they read, and this "unbelief" and rejection of them, as they read, could be true at the same time? Can the same words, in the same place, in the same matter and connection, have two different, and correct, meanings? So long, then, as the Reformed do not prove that our simple and literal understanding of the words of institution essentially injures and damages some other article of the doctrine of salvation — in which case, indeed, only a figurative understanding would be admissible — so long must we remain with our simple, plain understanding of them, and can, with it, provided we do not live and act contrary to it, stand firm in the hour of death.

What, then, are you doing when you enter into church fellowship with the Reformed? Despite your church's correct guidance, you walk with them the wrong path as though it were the right one, and thereby confirm them in this delusion; or, at the very least, you sin against your neighbor in that, through your churchly association with him, he becomes still more indifferent and reckless toward certain saving truths of God's Word, such as, for example, those concerning the Holy Sacraments.

And do you not thereby powerfully help to falsify and undermine true and unfeigned reverence for the whole Word of God in Holy Scripture and for the entirety of its saving truth? For this you certainly do, when, by your association and approval, you encourage your neighbor to remain either doubtful and uncertain, or reckless and indifferent, about individual points of this saving truth. Is this association, then, Christian love, when your neighbor's soul thereby suffers harm?

So we have now seen what Evangelicals were, and what those are at present who, unfortunately, wrongly seize this honorable name for themselves. Let no sincere but uninformed Lutheran Christian, then, be deceived by the appearance of love that these false Evangelicals display; for there is certainly no truth of love where there is no love of the full and pure truth — the truth which the triune God has entrusted to us in His Word, and which, unfalsified and undivided, without superstitious addition and without unbelieving subtraction, only the orthodox Church, presently called Evangelical Lutheran, testifies to and teaches in its confessional writings. —

Those Who Are Well Have No Need of a Physician, But Those Who Are Sick.
Luke 5:31.

The sicker a person is in soul, accordingly, the more surely he should rely on the fact that this Physician, our Lord Jesus Christ, is concerned with him; indeed, he should not even entertain the thought that, because of the sickness of his soul and because of his sins, he ought not to be so bold as to call upon Him. For who would not consider that person more sick in mind than in body who, when urged to send for a physician, said: I am not so bold as to send for a physician, because I am sick — when this is, after all, the very reason why he is urged to send for a physician? So who would not believe that sinner to be out of his senses who, when urged to call upon Christ in faith, answered: I am not so bold, because I am a sinner — when it is precisely for this reason that one needs to call upon Christ, and He wills that one call upon Him. Come unto me, He says, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. But you will say: I know that Christ is the Physician; I know that one should call upon Him in order to be cleansed from sin; but this I fear, that I may have provoked Him to such great wrath through my many repeated sins that, even if I now call upon Him, He may not come or help me. These are the fiery darts with which Satan assails the weak conscience. But one must, in turn, hold up the shield of faith against them, and thereby catch these fiery darts in such a way that they are driven back upon their own master. For how Christ is disposed toward us must be judged not by the feeling of our heart, but by the promises and the word