# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1856_S196
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Sermon Preparation from Dr. Luther. 196

...need — but this confession is, after all, no disgrace. It may seem disgraceful to those who, in the so-called "intelligence" of our age, see proof as well that they are more capable theologians than Dr. Luther and the other fathers of our faith; but that means nothing to us, who seek salvation and the knowledge of salvation in faith in the Word of God. Let Dr. B. Kurtz, for all that, declare himself and the members of his famous "American Lutheran Church" to be fathers to Dr. Luther and the other theologians of past ages: we need not even laugh over it, for the Americans within the Lutheran Church have long since done that for us, and know quite as well as we do that that "American Lutheran Church" exists only in the imagination of its inventors and forms the signboard of a little handful of rationalists. That same ordinary rationalism we still see everywhere at home in churches and sects, and not least in the United States. The "sound common sense" — in English, common sense — which the rationalists (Dr. B. Kurtz among them, for example) make into the interpreter of Scripture and the touchstone of church doctrine, is nothing other than the system of belief which the individual person grounds on his own pleasure and shapes in agreement with his own inclinations. It differs with every person; it rejects the Bible in the case of some, insists loudly on the Bible in the case of others, mocks the articles of the Christian faith here, accepts as much of them there as suits it — but in one thing it is alike in all: that it sets the pious life above faith and doctrine, and grounds faith on any manner of human things — feeling, experience, prayer, spiritual or even bodily emotions — only not on the Word of God. This "sound common sense," and the rationalism built upon it, is not merely the air in which the churchly life of the present age lives, is not merely the ruling power in the church and sect life of this land, does not merely press in upon us from every side under the most deceptive forms, but has also exerted a predominant influence on our own upbringing, so that its manner of thought and expression became our own for a longer or shorter time, and therefore still often assails us today, and indeed clings to us in many respects. The teachers of the present age cannot free us from it, for they themselves fend it off only with difficulty; but free from it we must become, if we are ever truly to build the Holy Christian Church.

Perhaps we shall be accused of blindness toward the good gifts of knowledge that God has granted us. But we by no means belong to those who esteem a past age better than our own merely because it is past, and who prize the old for the sake of its antiquity. The present writer does nothing more gladly than to seek out, in the movements and labors of our own time, whatever stands the test of the Word of God, and whenever and wherever he finds any such thing, it is to him a truly heartfelt joy. He thanks his Lord that among preachers, indeed among members of congregations,