# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S99
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran Antitheses.                                99

...of unbelief. This one everyone brings with them into the world; the other is a free gift of grace from the Holy Spirit.

2) When natural man has put on his pious Sunday coat, one no longer calls him, as one would a peasant, "old Adam!" but rather titles him quite politely: "Herr Dr. Stier & Co." This courtesy is age-old.

3) When Herr Adam Stier knows how to patch up old Bibles and hymnbooks, he promptly wants to pass for an expert master in theology, and takes for himself the right to meddle in divine matters, in Christ's kingdom, Gospel, and faith. But because he has grasped so little of all this — no more than a blind man grasps of color — he prattles on unblushingly, without sense or savor, and falsifies, to the great harm of unbelievers and the credulous, Christian words and truths.

4) He falsifies the Christian words. For instead of: my flesh and blood, my beloved self, he says: "my Lord Christ"; instead of: my inborn desire and inclination, my self-love, he substitutes: my "faith of the heart."

5) He falsifies the Christian truths. For he insists stubbornly that between Christianity and anti-Christianity there must exist a peaceful alliance, that faith and unbelief must "complement one another."

6) That Herr Stier's pietistic enthusiasm for union finds the gospel of the Quakers and rationalists more to its taste than the "idol of dogma" of the apostles and reformers, he need not have bothered assuring us (Thes. 15, 178); — we already know the family relationships. Rationalism and Quakerism are siblings of Pietism; the gypsy religion is the not-yet-Christian-varnished great-grandmother of these triplets, and the progenitor of all four is old Adam; the breed does not depart from its kind.

7) Whether Adam appears as Pietist or as Rationalist, as Quaker or as Pantheist, as Pharisee or as Sadducee — in every guise, whether in dancer's garb or penitent's robe — he is and remains Master Ego, and his faith: egoism. Is my piety, then, my learning, my virtue, my mission-works and prayer-hours, my fasting, alms, and tract societies — are even all the kingdoms of the world and their glory to count for nothing at all, and Christ alone to be all in all? Never! — That is the alpha and omega of his philosophy, and — a "Lutheran," whoever does not agree with him on this point!

8) Hear how Herr Dr. Stier classifies his Lutheran contemporaries. a) "Arch-Lutherans:" the "historian" Rudelbach, the "thinker" Kahnis, the "exegete" Harleß. b) The unqualified: Delitzsch, Flörke, Guericke, Huschke, Kniewel, Victor Strauß, Bilmar, etc. c) "The arch-fanatic Ströbel," to whom not one good morsel is left — indeed not even that which distinguishes man from beast (compare Thes. 110). I must indeed have trodden hard on the man's unionist corns and pietist bunions, that