# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S101
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran Antitheses.                              101

...reveals herself" (Vilmar), claims to be — betrays a faith-empty, work-proud humility of pietists.

15) Whoever prefers to prattle, in good unionistic fashion, of several kinds of "pure sacrament, true Israel, Jerusalem, Zion," of two "evangelical churches," and the like, rather than believe, in good biblical fashion, in the great distinction between the visible and invisible Church, will not find Thes. 14—16 as indigestible as I do.

16) Yes, yes, we already know what pleasant, comfortable things this "living faith of the heart," this "blood of Christ in the veins" (Thes. 17, 18), are, and find their eloquent praise quite natural. What "believing" indifferentist, enthusiast, or unionist has ever hated his own flesh? Rather he nourishes it and cherishes it. Against us there indeed follows from this fact — utterly irrefutable "by Scripture and history" — "an enormous amount," which, however, belongs not here but in the chapter on gastronomic edification.

17) To receive the "weak" in faith and not to trouble their consciences is a divine commandment. But it is false that the apostles tolerated, "peacefully," religions of many kinds side by side; that they had, in the face of "fundamental" errors — indeed "even in the face of the Pharisaic denial of the basic formula of the Gospel, greater respect than Luther had"; that they entered into unionistic brotherhood with the blasphemers and falsifiers of the Gospel, as Thes. 19—23 would have us believe. The "Damnamus" alongside the "Docemus et Confitemur" is as old as the Christian Credimus, as old as the apostolic Gospel; compare Galatians 1:8-9. To build altars to truth and error at once is a violation of the first commandment, a Samaritan (2 Kings 17:28ff.) contempt for faith and the divine Word, both of which, in their innermost nature, are exclusive of misbelief and human doctrine, and always imply the verdict of rejection upon it in their "positive testimony," even when they do not express it as a formal antithesis.

18) "However much arrears still remain in sanctification, so much arrears remain also in knowledge, and thus a relative, partial error of faith." So speaks Pietism, which, following Adam's natural blindness, imagines it can stand before God not by the forgiveness of sins, but only, in the first instance, by sinlessness. If it were right, then Holy Scripture too would be no infallible Word of God, since its authors had by no means yet reached the goal of sanctification, and were, through inspiration, brought no single step nearer to it. If it were right, then Christ would be wrong, who himself found no "error of faith" even among the Pharisaic scribes sitting on Moses' seat. Even the demons can keep themselves free of errors of faith.

19) "Church of the future, that is, of the Union; — confession of the future; — the great future of the true Union;" these were the catchwords in the year