# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1846 05 16_S75
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

new and youthful faith, confession, and doctrine of the holy Christian Church from the beginning. For Luther and his co-workers did not, in fact, set up a single new article of faith; rather, by God's Word and through the illumination and power of the Holy Spirit, they victoriously cast to the ground all such new human contrivances which the Antichrist at Rome, together with his associates, had set up against Holy Scripture as articles of faith and commanded to be held as God's Word — such as, for example, the partial justification by works, from which fearful mother of lies and whore of the devil there were then born, among other things, the sacrifice of the Mass, purgatory, the worship of the saints, monkery, nunnery, and so forth. The Reformers, then, brought back to light only the one and the same church doctrine of old, out of God's Word, which had been so greatly distorted and darkened since the seventh century by the superstitious additions of Roman-papist, unscriptural human teaching and error. For just as Holy Scripture contains only "one truth unto salvation," so too has the holy Church, from the beginning, had only one and the same faith, confession, and doctrine, in content and essence, whose brief summary is the Apostles' Creed. But just as the one holy Christian Church, as the pillar and foundation of the truth, maintained and defended this its unanimous confession — which bound all congregations together — victoriously through Holy Scripture during the first five centuries against various foundation-shattering errors (for example, concerning the Trinity of God, the true deity and humanity of Christ, the unity of his divine-human person, original sin, and the grace of God), and for this purpose developed the attacked scriptural and church doctrines more fully out of the divine Word and grounded them more firmly out of the harmony of the clear, doctrinal passages of Scripture — just so has this same holy Christian Church, from the sixteenth century onward, through the service of Luther and his faithful fellow-witnesses,* maintained and defended, in exactly the same way, this same precious confession against the Roman-papist errors,* and set forth more clearly and precisely, out of the divine Word, the articles of faith and church doctrines now under attack and obscured, in their scriptural truth.

As the devil, however, the father of lies and originator of all errors, saw that the Holy Spirit, through his Word and his illumination, was putting to shame his superstitious additions among the faithful witnesses and confessors, he attempted it from another and indeed the opposite side, in order once again to damage the one, pure church doctrine; for he knew and knows full well that false doctrine must necessarily be followed by false faith and a false life, so that error, without the intervention of the Holy Spirit in his Word, helps him populate hell to no small degree. The enemy of truth, namely, now attempted it through an unbelieving casting-off of the wholesome doctrine, in that he tore the Swiss away from it on the one hand, and on the other stirred up against it the so-called heavenly prophets, Anabaptists, and similar factious and fanatical spirits. This happened, however, by his puffing them up with carnal, rationalistic conceit and spiritual pride — in part by having them claim special illuminations and revelations of the Holy Spirit alongside, apart from, and above the written Word of God, which were also supposed to be the key to the obscure, figurative passages of Holy Scripture; in part by having them depart, in the case of the Lord's clear and explicit institutions and ordinances, from the plain words of institution as they stand, and substitute for them an artificial meaning. This latter course was taken, as is well known, with the doctrine of the Holy Sacraments, in that now, through the devil's blinding and man's pride of reason, the Reformed error concerning these articles fully developed — an error which maintains, now as before, that bread is bread and wine is wine! and which makes the almighty and truthful Son of God a liar to exactly the same degree that it stands opposed to the unanimous teaching of the holy Christian Church from the beginning.*

This same Church, however, rose up — especially in the chosen instrument Dr. Martin Luther, by the grace of the Holy Spirit — against this unbelieving casting-off practiced by the enthusiasts and sacramentarians as well; and this man of God not only upheld, against those spirit-mongers and false prophets, the judging and decisive authority of Holy Scripture, by which all so-called revelations of the Holy Spirit are to be tested (and not the reverse), but, especially in his two greater polemical writings, overthrew the artificial pseudo-arguments of the sacramentarians by God's Word so thoroughly that afterward only feeble attempts remained to patch them back together.

Thus Luther and his faithful fellow-combatants — among whom, however, the so-called Swiss Reformers are not to be counted — restored the faith, the confession, and the doctrine of the one holy Christian Church, by cleansing it of the superstitious additions of the Papists, and by upholding, against the unbelieving casting-off practiced by the enthusiasts, the articles that had been thrown into confusion and attacked from both sides — developing and presenting them, of course, carefully out of God's Word against both the adders-on and the casters-off.* And this twofold testimony of theirs against the Papists and the enthusiasts, together with their assertion of the old, original faith of the Church, once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3), was gathered together in 1530 into the Augsburg Confession, which is nothing other than a fuller development and clearer statement of the Apostles' Creed, necessarily called forth by the twofold contradiction of the Romanists and the enthusiasts. And since the same contradiction continued from both sides — indeed, new errors, such as the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional predestination even unto damnation, were added still — the orthodox Church, then called the Evangelicals, was compelled to develop and set forth individual articles of the Augsburg Confession still more closely and precisely, according to and out of God's Word; and from this arose, for example, the Apology (Defense) of the Confession against the Papists, and the Formula of Concord of 1580, against Roman and enthusiast error, and for the settling of disputes within the orthodox Church itself.

From this brief, surveying account it is therefore clear what Lutherans are, namely: confessors of the one holy, orthodox Christian Church, whose one and same faith, confession, and doctrine is, in all articles of saving truth, entirely conformable and agreeable to Holy Scripture. "Lutheran," therefore — that is, a fellow-confessor and follower of Luther's confession, or an orthodox Christian — is essentially the same thing, whether or not such persons actually experience and preserve the Church's faith inwardly and from the heart. For even in the latter case, the faith of the Church is no more made wrong or impure by their personal unbelief than the sun loses any of its brightness on account of sleepers, or blind, willful, closed, or diseased eyes.

If this is so, then it follows irrefutably that, in essence and in truth, there neither are now, nor ever will be, Old and New Lutherans. For just as Holy Scripture, as noted above, contains and testifies to only one "truth unto salvation," and just as this saving truth has nothing to do with changes and alterations of time, and

* Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Calvin, and others did not remain faithful, although at first they confessed and held the faith of the Church together with Luther; they later departed from the sound churchly middle path and fell, in reaction against the superstitious additions of the Roman Church, into the opposite extreme — into an unbelieving casting-off, and into a tearing asunder of what God has joined together. The history of the Reformation proves this. (See The Lutheran, Vol. 1, No. 13, and Vol. 2, No. 7.) It seems that, besides unconditional obedience to the harmony of the clear doctrinal statements of Holy Scripture, they also lacked the deeper inner experience of justifying faith as an inward light.

* For example, concerning the equal worth and validity — alongside, indeed above, Holy Scripture itself — of the so-called apostolic oral traditions, the decrees of church councils, and the decisions of the popes; concerning the right of the popes to establish articles of faith for the Church and alone to interpret Scripture; concerning the cooperation and meritoriousness of human works toward the forgiveness of sins and salvation; concerning the blessing of the holy sacraments apart from repentance and faith on the part of the recipients, and so forth.

* So universally acknowledged and beyond doubt was the Lutheran — that is, the scripturally faithful — doctrine of the Holy Supper in the pre-papist, truly catholic, orthodox Church, that in the controversies over the two natures in Christ, this Church frequently made use of the Holy Supper as a refutation against those who divided or transformed the two natures; for, it said, just as in the Supper the heavenly good — namely, the body and blood of Christ — is essentially and truly united with the earthly good of the bread and wine, and yet the one is not changed into the other, nor is it any the less separated from it, so also it stands with the union of the divine and human natures in the one person of the Lord Jesus Christ.

* And so, for example, the doctrines of justification and of the holy sacraments were, already in the age of the Reformation, so decisively maintained and so faithfully worked out and developed in the Lutheran system of doctrine against every objection, that our confession-slack, shallow Unionists would scarcely be able to bring a new objection to market against the latter.