# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S108
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

108 Lutheran Antitheses.

53) The sole genuine ground of faith on which even the Reformation stands, from the Colloquy of Marburg down to and including the Formula of Concord, is syncretism and indifferentism — the "letting fall" of the distinguishing doctrines of all religions and the emphasizing of what is common to them. (Thesis 147–151.)

54) The apostles were decided indifferentists, and "in view of the character of the apostolic age" we ought to "recoil" from the unity of faith and doctrine. "Did even Paul, Peter, and John teach one and the same doctrine — to say nothing of James?" (Thesis 152, 153.)

55) "Did not John himself already bend the Christ-for-us into the Christ-in-us?" ("As Kahnis charges against Nitzsch, regarding the doctrine of union.") Here we encounter the unionist material principle, the "Christ in us," in place of the evangelical and Reformation "Christ for us." Whoever has learned to know, from the history of the Reformation, the distinction and the struggle between these two principles will rightly understand and judge my assertion that the spirit of the Reformation is now fighting against the spirit of the Union. Only a hero like Stier — who has spent his days in pietism and unionism, and therefore indulges an insuperable hatred and abhorrence of Christ and the Gospel — could declare it a "confused fantasy in a Lutheran fever." Had John done what Kahnis charges against "the doctrine of union," then his earnest warnings against the "Antichrist" would have been merely the words of a fool or a hypocrite; for the most essential nota characteristica of Antichristendom is precisely that satanic "bending of Christ." To teach people to trust in the Christ within them, instead of in the Christ for them, means comforting them with their own holiness. Let Mr. Stier and his fellow believer, the bloated Pharisee, go right on thanking God, as they pound on the Christ within them, that they are not like other men — namely, not like this tax collector and his kindred believer, the "arch-fanatic," who set their trust not on holy "work-righteousness," but on God's grace, on the Christ for them. We know in whom we believe, and we will not let ourselves be led astray into following the example of those self-made men of works. Let the Lutherans well consider that the 158th thesis preaches to them, under the most specious name, apostasy from the Lord who has purchased their souls with his blood.

56) So then, Luther was a falsifier of Scripture who sinned against God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, because he taught justification "by faith alone" and did not, like Zwingli and Calvin, hold the Supper to be "mere bread and wine"! (Thesis 154, 155.)

57) Mr. Stier is quite content to let the "evangelium" stand, but not the "doctrina evangelii;" for this, he says, is not the ground on which the Christian Church can and should rest. (Thesis 156, 157.) One would like to