# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S103
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran Antitheses. 103

before the insistence on church law and “legal standing!” Learn even from the enemy (Theses 39–45) the seriousness of the undeniable fact that a confession on paper is a fiction, an unchurchly lie! “Faith and confession must be in living practice if they are to have validity; pointing to musty legal documents is itself musty”—so I shall always say. Follow the enemy’s advice: “Preach the Gospel!” Of course, not what he euphemistically calls by that name: Then by chance a pious notion came to me, etc., which fills the Union churches “with the wealth of its testimonies” and products, but rather the apostolic Gospel of righteousness through faith alone. Preach it by mouth and pen, livingly, freshly, and freely, as a light against pietistic darkness, as a medicine against Union fever. You will see greater success from it than from appealing to “dust-covered records.”

25) For this reason alone I am unfit to be a “believing” Unionist: I call everything by its proper name and have no talent for circumlocutions. Thus, for example, I would blurt out crudely: The Gospel is “that repulsively strange, ambiguous thing which causes offense and confusion everywhere”; or: No preacher may be required to proclaim Christianity. But that would run directly counter to believing-Unionist terminology, as may be learned from Theses 46–52. In order to attack Christ and His Gospel safely in our day, one must keep a good supply of differently sounding expressions at hand, such as “new Old Lutheranism, self-chosen and rigidly sharpened orthodoxy, domination by the Symbolical Books, compulsory affirmation of propositions not understood, Judaism within the Lutheran Church, imposed confessionalism, mild practice,” and so forth. The thing is really not at all bad; one achieves one’s purpose and avoids all unnecessary offense.

26) The Gospel “goes about haunting only as a specter”? Superstition! How can a Doctor of Theology allow a specter to squeeze fifty-eight pages’ worth of anxious sweat out of him? His terror would be more understandable if someone had alarmed him by saying that Unionism was the cholera of souls; for spectral pestilences are not so easily got rid of as goblins. Or has the “haunting” perhaps already defied the cock’s crow and the formula of exorcism? That, of course, would be a different case.

27) “I too believe that I preach the Gospel, and yet I am in the same position of being able to be neither wholly Lutheran nor wholly Reformed.” We take Dr. Stier at his word, precisely because he wishes to stand on the ground of religious “private opinion, subjective view, and the like.” Now when a man of opinions instructs a churchman in Christianity, the lesson turns out as set forth in Theses 53–72.

28) “The united church has been asked how it intends to demonstrate its credentials from the Word of God: a strange question!” Yes, indeed, it was a good-natured oddity to ask a church which, according to Theses 70–78, rests solely on