# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1855_S276
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

276

Comfort for a Lutheran from the Gracious Intercession of Mary.

In this year's May issue of the "lutherische Dorf-Kirchenzeitung" [Lutheran Village Church Gazette], its editor, Pastor Diedrich of Jabel in the Kingdom of Prussia (who, be it said in passing, rails against our synod and its doctrine, as unintelligently as unchristianly, on the basis of reports from our opponents), seeks to justify a proposition he had earlier set forth: that he "takes comfort in the gracious intercession of Mary." To prove that one may speak of a "gracious" intercession of Mary, the aforesaid goes so far as to maintain that Mary herself may be called "a Queen of Heaven." Indeed, the man is so much in earnest in his campaign for Mary that he allows himself to be carried away to the utterance: "We too should press right up to the border and plant our sword, the cross of the LORD, in the ground and cry out, just as men once cried: the sword of the LORD and of Gideon! so now for this occasion: the sword of the LORD and of Mary!" And shortly before that: "Christ has given us his mother too: I do not say by this that we would not need to have her: I rejoice that she too belongs to us, and before I would let this joy go, I would rather mourn the parting from many another." Afterward: "One ought not to set the LORD over against his mother, or to set her up all by herself and then say: She is nothing."

One can scarcely believe one's eyes at the thought that such things should have been written by a man who claims to be a thoroughly orthodox Lutheran. Yet in the same paper, Mr. Diedrich speaks elsewhere very contemptuously of a faithful adherence to the Symbols. He writes: "The Missourians are, by their modern (!) concept of an invisible church, essentially unionistic (!), however much they may venerate the Symbols as the Jews of old venerated the brazen serpent." (This, as is well known, is the very reproach that Spener once leveled at the so-called Orthodox. How the scene does change with these gentlemen!) "The Symbols," he says, "make them" (the Missourians) "into a paper pope." And what does Mr. Diedrich himself do? To justify his comfort drawn from the gracious intercession of Mary, he appeals to the Symbols, because he lacked any ground for it in Scripture! He appeals, namely, to the words in the Apology, Article 21: "Even granting that Mary, the mother of God, prays for the church." This citation proves that it certainly could do the good man no harm if he studied the symbolical books a little more carefully; for then he would first have discovered, from comparison with the Latin original of the Apology, the true sense of the words cited above — a sense which would indeed have reminded him of the shakiness of his ground for comfort. For thus it reads in the Latin original: Ut largiamur, quod beata Maria oret pro ecclesia — that is, granting even that the blessed Mary prays for the church. Anyone can see that the