# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1846 06 27_S87
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

faith, comfort, Christ, and conscience are; and thus one blind man leads another, and both fall into the pit. Therefore let them go, and let them keep on falling; guard yourself against them." (Works XVII, 2453ff.) Here the Methodist leaders, who so dreadfully slander holy absolution, have Luther's judgment upon them. May they therefore cease to cloak their fanaticism with twisted and misunderstood sayings of Luther.

Furthermore, Luther writes the following concerning the glory of absolution: "The other cause and inducement to full confession is the precious and noble promise of God in the four sayings: Matthew 16:19, 'Whatsoever thou shalt loose shall be loosed'; Matthew 18:18, 'Whatsoever ye shall loose shall be loosed'; John 20:23, 'Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them'; Matthew 18:19–20, 'If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.' Whoever is not moved by such lovely words must indeed have a cold faith and be a loose Christian. For although each one may confess to God by himself and be reconciled with God in secret, yet he has no one to pronounce a verdict upon which he may rest content and quiet his conscience; he must worry that he has not done enough. But it is a fine and sure thing that he lay hold of God by God's own words and promises, that he obtain a strong support and confidence in divine truth, so that he may freely and boldly press forward, just as God himself would, with his own truth, speaking in this way: Now, dear God, I have confessed and revealed my sin to my neighbor before you, and have united myself with him in your name and desired grace; so you have promised out of great grace: what is loosed shall be loosed, and it shall be done by your Father, whatever we desire in agreement; so I hold myself to your promise, I do not doubt your truth; as my neighbor has released me in your name, so I am released, and let it happen to me as we have desired. Now God is truthful, and we are certain that he keeps what he promises (Psalm 33:4), so that St. Paul says to Timothy, II, 2:13: 'If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.' Therefore such divine truth in his promise is indeed an overflowing, precious, rich, and strong security, which lets no one sink or founder. It must stand above all power in heaven and on earth, so that God himself gives himself therein to be won as one's own." (Little Book on Confession, XIX, 1076ff.)

Johannes Brenz writes as follows: "You will say: What use is absolution to me, if I already believe that Christ has suffered for me? I answer: Like the sacraments, absolution too has been instituted in order to confirm our conscience in doubts and to strengthen our faith. For we have often said that there is nothing more tender than the conscience, and also nothing more slow to believe, especially in divine matters that are not perceived by the senses. For we are born in ignorance of divine things. Therefore we always carry doubt about with us, and it reveals itself chiefly in times of trial. For when God's judgment upon sin has been revealed in the conscience, and we feel its weight, we still tend to doubt, even though we hear that Christ has suffered for us, because we feel the opposite of it with pain. Although the Gospel is preached publicly, and every sermon about Christ is an absolution from sins, yet a conscience troubled by its sins is very weak, and thinks that the public absolution does not apply to it, but to I know not what sort of saints; it requires a private absolution. Therefore Christ instituted the sacraments, first baptism, then the Supper of the Lord, so that through these, as through letters and seals from heaven, we might be strengthened in faith. Finally he also instituted absolution like his own handwritten note, in order to make us certain on every side concerning his will. For we think thus: You indeed hear the Gospel, you have the sacraments, baptism and the Supper, as God's letters and seals; but you would be much more certain if you heard God himself speaking with you, or had his own handwritten note. Therefore Christ left absolution behind him, and confirmed it as God's own voice, in that he says: He who hears you hears me; and he confirmed it as his own handwritten note, in that he says: that shall also be loosed in heaven." (Homil. de poen., VIII, IX.)

We could still bring forward a whole cloud of testimonies from the most godly and enlightened theologians concerning the glory of holy absolution, but in order not to make this article unusually long, we let only one further testimony follow, from a man who is himself regarded by the dreadfully fanatical sect of the Methodists as converted, indeed as highly enlightened — namely, Johann Arndt; he writes in his Postil as follows:

"Therefore these words, 'Whosesoever sins ye forgive,' are a divine authorization and conferral of God's power, in his name, by his command, out of God's authority, to forgive sin; and because it happens by God's command, in God's stead, in God's name, it is powerful in heaven and on earth; for what God ordains and commands, he surely upholds; where his Word and command is, there is God's power, eternal, unchangeable truth. Therefore holy absolution is a great comfort, in that God has laid the forgiveness of sins into his Word, and that Word, in the mouth of the priest and of Christians, is God's authorization, his Word, ordinance, and command." (p. 731.)

Before we now close, we must still call attention to an untruth which Mr. Nast set down in the aforementioned paper — one which indeed testifies to a complete lack of a sharpened conscience, but which we would rather attribute to the ignorance of the writer, who, lacking sources, patiently copied down untruths already put into circulation. Mr. Nast writes as follows: "There has indeed never been a lack of Lutheran theologians who contested this unscriptural doctrine of confession and absolution. A mass of polemical writings has appeared on this subject. In particular we read of a certain J. C. Schade, preacher at St. Nicholas's Church in Berlin in the seventeenth century. This man, in his writing 'Praxis des Beichtstuhls und Abendmahls' (Practice of the Confessional and the Lord's Supper), rejected not only private confession and absolution, but even called the confessional a seat of Satan and a pit of fire; and although he himself served in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, he nevertheless called it, with reference to this false doctrine retained from the papacy, Babylon and an appendage of the Babylonian whore."

To this we answer: there have indeed always been enemies of the divine institution of holy absolution who have written against it, but these enemies were not Lutheran theologians, but partly fanatics who never professed the Lutheran church, partly men who had fallen away from it, and finally, in the previous century, wolves arising from within the Lutheran Church itself who did not spare the flock (Acts 20:29–30) and prepared the dreadful decline in which it is now seen; to these belong the fanatics Schwenckfeld, Weigel,*) and Paracelsus; the Anabaptists; Zwingli,**) and others.

*) Weigel writes: "Woe to the originators and confirmers of such confessing and absolving; both shall be cast into the eternal pit." Postil, Part II, p. 250.

**) Zwingli writes: "It is an impudence, that men have taught that man becomes certain through the keys, who is certain only inwardly through faith. In vain will you say: You are free — for you can no more make him certain by your word than you make an elephant out of a fly by saying: You are an elephant." (Cf. Lib. de vera et falsa rel.)

As for the well-known J. C. Schade, Mr. Nast has also had lies printed about him, which, as we are not unaware, have often already been circulated about him. We do not have the cited booklet at hand, but the title alone shows that it deals not with the doctrine, but with the practice — that is, in plain German, with the use — of confession and absolution. On this point, hopefully, the testimony of Spener, who was Schade's colleague and delivered his funeral sermon, will carry weight. The former testifies as follows: "He (Schade) had his scruples not about the confessional itself, but about the fact that he was to lay hands upon and pronounce absolution over all who came to confession, since he had no opportunity to properly examine their worthiness so as to quiet his conscience. This question at last led him, in the queries he published on the matter and in