# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S114
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

114 Lutheran Antitheses.

bring about? The “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” surely rings ceaselessly in the ears of your conscience and pursues you at every step. But instead of heeding it with the apostle, you prefer to drown it out by the most wretched means;—your “un-Lutheran theses” are fully valid witnesses to this. Indeed, the appeals from the upright Christ “for” us to the one “bent into” us, from the blood that flowed on Golgotha to that which “flows in your veins,” from Holy Scripture to “speculation, history, and more recent exegesis,” from the ecumenical faith to the faith of Quakers and enthusiasts—they are sedatives of the most wretched kind, suited only to self-deception; and alongside them—from forgetfulness? hypocrisy? or what other motive?—you yourselves repeatedly set up the very opposite, proving how little you yourselves trust those tiresome comforters, which are borrowed in large part from the rusty arsenal of the Rationalists whom you once hated so furiously, but now so tenderly love as allies against us. And what a wretched spiritual sleeping potion is your “church of the future”! Instead of recalling a prudent statesman’s simile of the ball rolling restlessly down an inclined plane, instead of Christ’s solemn word about the green wood and the dry, you prefer to lull yourselves and others into spiritual sleep with the lullaby of a “typological church of the future,” growing on the trunk of the Indifferentist Union and shining in the glory of Christian perfection, merely so that you need not admit that in religious matters we are in the right and you are in the wrong. My religion is God’s Word, which will outlast heaven and earth—yours is a morning mist dispersed by wind and sun. Whoever must say of his faith that it resembles a doubtful lawsuit (“the case is still before the judge”) thereby condemns it himself and declares it a quasi-faith upon which no one can confidently rely. Because you sense this very well, you continually press yourselves upon those who possess firm religious comfort and refuge, so that, if possible, you may have in them brothers in faith, or at least companions in misfortune. “Our Union has room for you too,” you call out to them, and thereby achieve precisely the opposite of what you intend: you merely drive them still farther away from you. For only someone who regards the Redeemer and His Holy Spirit, God’s Word and Sacraments, as human ordinances can utter that Indifferentist cry, which testifies to a desolate emptiness of faith and radical ignorance of the Gospel. Christ will never be brought so low that He must ask for Himself and His own a modest little place in “your Union” and under your supervision; He Himself possesses a mighty, eternal kingdom and is not a subject, but the ruler and conqueror of Antichrist (Psalm 110:1–2; 2 Thessalonians 2:8). Because I live in this conviction, your offer to “admit” me is wasted on me; I know in whom I believe and in whom you believe. By God’s grace I possess the gift of testing the spirits, and I will never mistake the unionist spirit for the Christian spirit, nor the unionist religion for