# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1857_S44
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

44 Lutheran-theological Pastor's Library.

...among all of them written the best, most thorough, most powerful work against the errors of the Reformed, but that these polemical writings of Luther altogether surpass everything that has ever been accomplished in the field of polemics. Whoever has not yet read these writings does not yet know what it truly means to engage in polemics. If one reads them, one does not know what to admire more in them: whether the wielding of weapons from the armory of the divine Word, or of human weapons; whether the dialectic employed in them, or the rhetoric; whether the content or the form; whether the richness that shows itself in them, or the power of Luther's spirit that reveals itself in them; whether the sharpness of judgment, or the fervor of the heart. Luther's polemical writings make him who already believed from the heart the truths he defended shout for joy; they strengthen the weak in faith; they make the hitherto doubting certain; to him who until then was ignorant of the matter and, out of weakness, caught in error, they give full light on it; and the willfully resisting adversary of the truth they crush. Luther strides through them as David against Goliath, and the reader can hardly help but hear him, like David, calling out to his opponents: "You come to me with sword, spear, and shield; but I come to you in the name of the LORD of Hosts, the God of the army of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the LORD will deliver you into my hand," etc. The longer one reads in these writings and immerses oneself in them, the more indubitable it becomes that here it is not a man fighting against flesh and blood, but that the LORD himself, through his chosen instrument, fights against the prince of darkness, who has led poor men astray to make themselves his tools. Luther's polemical writings are not battles arrayed according to some fixed campaign plan of logic, but like a mighty river they break forth from the written Word of God as from the "fountains of the great deep," and irresistibly, with the force of God, sweep away with them everything that sets itself against them, amid rolling thunder and flashing lightning out of heaven. Myconius writes of the sermon that Luther preached after the ratification of the Wittenberg Concord of 1536, on Ascension Day, on the words "Go ye into all the world," etc.: "I had indeed often heard Luther preach, but at that time it seemed to me as though he were not merely speaking, but thundering out of heaven itself in the name of Christ." (Luther's Works, Halle edition, XVII, 2542.) The same impression is received by everyone who reads Luther's polemical writings with a mind open to the truth. In addition, they have this peculiarity, as do all the writings of this true reformer: that in them, instructive and engaging alike for the simplest and for the most learned, even the most cunning sophistries of the adversaries are laid plainly bare before the eyes, and even the deepest doctrines of divine revelation are set forth, grounded, and developed in the clearest and brightest light. Buddeus