# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S111
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran Antitheses. 111

"...of German national unity," which, as is well known, consists for the greater part of adherents of Rome, "is and remains, in the ecclesiastical sphere, a struggle against Rome through the unanimous assertion and working-out of the Gospel." The notion is so extravagant a futurum non exactum that its very inventor must himself append a hedge to it: "even though appearances may now, more than ever, speak against it." But further: in order now to belong to the "German national unity," the Lutherans must "abandon their Lutheranism" and convert to the Zwinglian-Calvinist religion, seeing that Zurich and Geneva, Zwingli and Calvin, are German, whereas Luther and Wittenberg are foreign. Now, whoever does not find that self-evident must, like unfortunate me, "have lost his mind."

72) Whoever knows what a shameful yoke of human bondage every union-man has to drag along can only shrug his shoulders in pity over Thesis 194, 196.

73) Thesis 196 is a variation on the well-known Stier-ish theme: it is man's faith that makes the sacrament of the altar, not the powerless Christ and his empty word of institution. The Zwinglian-Calvinists have, over against their "faith," always maintained the poverty of the divine Word. Even in the age of the Reformation it was to them "a poor shouting from the pulpit."

74) True, the "newest overstraining of the concept of the [ministerial] office and of absolution," as well as the insistence on adiaphora ("old-Lutheran forms of worship" — Thesis 197, 198), are deeply to be lamented. But even after the removal of these and of all other real abuses, "Lutheranism" would still remain, for Mr. Dr. Stier, a stumbling block — why? Because it preaches justification through the merit of Christ. It is for this very reason that he also presses (Thesis 199) for the removal of the ancient and traditional pericopes, of the "unadulterated hymns, prayers, and devotional books of former times," and for a pietistic-unionist correction of the Lutheran Bible translation. That this should become "a Vulgate" is a very small danger; but all the greater is the benefit which a new Bible, cleansed of the Gospel and of other errors, would hold for Mr. Dr. Stier and his fellow religionists.

75) "The division of the Commandments conceded to be in accordance with Scripture" (Thesis 200, cf. 171) is a droll "curiosum," a ridiculous proof of Calvinolatry and letter-worship. Does the Bible, then, divide the Decalogue by headings into a first, second, etc. commandment? Or does it say anywhere that Luther's division is false? Or is the Heidelberg Catechism, perhaps, even a canonical book? It was simply from the fact that the individual commandments are not furnished with numbers in Holy Scripture that the double numbering could arise. That is the true state of the matter, and it takes a painfully servile spirit of the law — one with not the faintest inkling of the meaning of the divine Word, such as is proper to Calvinism — to declare the Heidelberg numbering to be the