# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S113
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran Antitheses. 113

Malz. Unless God’s grace leads you over to me, our religious paths are forever divided. My confidence in life and death is different from yours. You earn salvation through your holy life, through your good works; I receive it as a gift from Jesus Christ, the “doctrinal bogeyman.” For me, the pure Word of God, the unadulterated Gospel, stands above everything; you regard “pure doctrine” as an abomination, and you count the false prophets against whom the Lord and His apostles warn among the “most believing Evangelicals in the Union.” I know only a Lord’s Supper instituted by the Redeemer; you know only one instituted by yourselves. Your faith, your spirit, your God is different from mine. Nor has it ever occurred to me to make you think differently—so why do you wish to “engage” with me? You at least wish to cultivate my “language”? Many thanks for your good intention. But every little bird sings “as its beak has grown”; why should I not speak as my heart prompts me? I have never demanded that you speak “correct Lutheran”; for you are not “Lutherans” and do not wish to be. But since I am no more willing to be or become a Pietist and Unionist, by what fairness do you expect me to learn to whine and prattle piously like a Pietist, and to speak with a forked tongue and turn phrases like a Unionist? In this respect too, then, I do not see why you wish to “engage” with me. Rather, if I am such a man as you portray me in Paul’s words (1 Timothy 6:4–5), you should observe the apostle’s instruction: “Withdraw yourself from such people!” Instead, you seek me out—how is that? I will tell you. You are the people of whom it is written in 1 Timothy 4:1–2 that their consciences are seared with a hot iron. For you falsely persuade yourselves and others that Unionism is a divine religion, and yet you can never attain inward peace and certainty concerning its foundation: the abolition of the eternal distinction between truth and error. You deceive yourselves and others by pretending that you are the true Evangelical Christians, although the inward voice ceaselessly cries out to you: You have broken with the Reformation, with the ecumenical Church, with the apostolic faith; not a single bond any longer connects you with Christendom; your religion falls entirely under the judgment of Galatians 1:6–9. You malign me in the vilest manner, with the obvious purpose of making me hated and despised by everyone, yet in the deepest recesses of your hearts you cannot conceal from yourselves that, in the final analysis, no other charge rests upon me than that of faithful adherence to the faith of the prophets and apostles, of universal Christendom, and of the Reformation. What does it profit you to create before the world the outward appearance that you are fighting only against my “arch-fanaticism” and Luther’s stubbornness? Can such hypocrisy also silence the inward warning cry that rises ever anew: You are indeed the sons of the scribes and Pharisees who nailed the Lord to the cross—to si-

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