# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S116
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

116 Lutheran Antitheses.

sown because the true friends of the Union rested too soon and were not vigilant enough: let us make amends for that, my brothers!” It will help you little; you yourselves also doubt that it will succeed, otherwise you would not ask with ever-increasing “anxiety and alarm”: Where will all this ultimately lead? I will at least help you find the answer. All your anxious questions were also raised by Jews and heathens in the first Christian centuries; church history, the spread of the Gospel, has answered them. Even your bold and blunt question is not new. Muslims long ago reproached Christians—and Papists reproached Protestants—with their internal conflicts. Christ’s kingdom on earth is, after all, an eccl. militans, in which religious controversies will never be lacking. Your Union, of course, is an eccl. triumphans, free from all struggles over faith because it is free from all faith. Thus all your questioning does not deliver you from your troubles. Why do you question us? Why do you quarrel with us? The risen Redeemer and His Spirit draw a fatal line through your clever calculations.

80) Yes indeed, just let us confidently “all go our way with our Lutheran sin against God’s Word and Spirit,” just as we, too, are willing to let you go wherever you please, without ever “demanding punishment from you for your sin” (Theses 209, 210). Like our fathers, we can boldly let the matter rest on Gamaliel’s pronouncement in Acts 5:38–39, for “God’s Word is Luther’s teaching; therefore it shall never pass away, however greatly it may vex the devil and his entire host.” If you cannot likewise appeal to that pronouncement, you thereby declare your Unionism itself to be a little human invention. Therefore: “eventus docebit.”

81) “In sum, Protestant Christians are to be taught and admonished that Scripture alone is valid, and no human ordinance” (Theses 211, 212). What does one call it when Christians are directed now to the “human ordinances” according to 1746, now to God’s Word, to “Scripture alone”? Is it perhaps called religious frivolity? Or conscious and deliberate deception? Or a wicked indifferentist game with that on which the soul and salvation depend? Or—thoughtless babbling?—What does one call it when those “seeking Christ and recognizing Him from Scripture” are warned against the “cry: See, Christ is here or there!” and yet at every moment they are told: See, He is not among the “Lutherans,” who have Scripture, but in the Union, which rejects it?—When consciences are turned away from the prophetic-apostolic-Reformation faith that lies before our age as before all ages, bringing salvation today as yesterday and for all eternity, in order to seduce them into a figment of the imagination called the religion of the future?—When in this way the Savior, who came to save sinners and still comes daily in His Gospel and pure Sacraments, is apostatically rejected, and, together with the hardened Jews, one waits for a Messiah-