# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1847 03 23_S80
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

and Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh, built an altar on the other side of the Jordan, the other tribes were at first indignant over the transgression of the law of which they believed the aforementioned tribes guilty; but when it came to light that that altar was meant to be only a witness- and memorial-stone, and was in no way to serve idolatry, the indignant brothers were reassured, and praised and glorified God. Compare Joshua 22. So too the Reformed gentlemen, together with their train-bearers, Mr. Weyl of Baltimore and other non-Lutherans, ought rightly to be reassured when they hear that we Lutherans keep images, crucifixes, altars, etc., not for veneration, not for offering sacrifice and the like, but merely for adornment and for a possible godly remembrance.

Here perhaps some will still object that, while not all images are to be rejected, it is nevertheless wrong in any case to depict God and to make for oneself a likeness of him, since God's invisible being cannot and should not be depicted (Deuteronomy 4:15). Whoever does this, they say, represents God according to human notions, thereby bringing false conceptions of God into people's hearts, and thus manifestly commits idolatry, as Aaron did with the golden calf. We answer: in this we are in complete agreement with the Reformed; we too reject as idolatrous all images that man makes of God out of his own devising. In Lutheran churches and books, therefore, only depictions of God's self-revelations (not of God as he is in himself) are tolerated. For example, we tolerate depictions of the revelation of God the Father as an aged man, after Daniel 7:9; of God the Son as a Son of Man, after Daniel 7:13, 1 Timothy 3:16, and after the whole New Testament; of God the Holy Spirit as a dove, after Matthew 3:16. Here also belong all images that, instead of with letters, are rendered with colors, by which the Bible itself represents the attributes of God, such as the eye, and the like. To reject this is in fact ridiculous, since one would then also evidently have to be forbidden to receive any such image into one's soul. Would to God that our opponents formed for themselves in their hearts no other image of God than that which the Bible draws of him; then they would soon come to agree with us regarding the outward images of adornment and remembrance; but against supposed visible idols people fight with fists and axes, while the idols in the heart, which arise through false doctrine, are left unchallenged upon their throne. Compare Romans 2:22, 2 John 9, 1 Samuel 15:22-23. If, therefore, you image-breakers wish to have work to do, here you have a field of labor: go into your own heart — there is enough to do there!

What, then, is finally the conclusion we must draw from everything we have said about the use of images, etc.? It is this: it is not the old Lutheranism that leads to Rome, for in these matters it teaches freedom according to God's Word; but the new counterfeit Lutheranism does indeed lead to Rome, for it forbids, in good Roman fashion, what God has left free.

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This conclusion Luther himself once drew in his struggle against Carlstadt. He writes: "From this now note who are the cousins of the Antichrist, we or Carlstadt. We act like the papists, except that we do not tolerate doctrine, commandment, and compulsion; we also permit, like the Carlstadtians, but we do not tolerate the prohibition. So the pope and Carlstadt are indeed proper cousins in their teaching, for they both teach — one the doing, the other the not-doing. But we teach neither, and do both." (Treatise against the Heavenly Prophets.)

(To be continued.)

(Submitted by H. Fick.)

The Marburg Colloquy, a Proof that the Lutheran Church Has From the Beginning Rejected Not the True, but the False, Union.
(Conclusion.)

It now lies upon us as a sad duty to show how faithlessly the Reformed acted toward our people, in that soon afterward they again publicly confessed the false doctrines which they had solemnly recanted at Marburg.

How little Oecolampadius was in earnest with his signature, however great a love of peace he otherwise always professed, he stated unreservedly in a letter to Haller: "By this disputation one has not advanced a single step." By this he himself declares all the concessions and promises which his party had made to the Lutherans to be mere pretense and a deceitful game. Bucer, indeed, testifies that in Luther and his party there was the true love of God; but he remarks at the same time that Zwingli and his party had accepted the Marburg Articles only out of love, and for no other reason, although they would have expressed their view better had they themselves been the ones to draw them up — indeed, would rather have used other and clearer words. So, out of love — we ask, what love is meant here? — the Reformed held fast in their hearts to the false doctrines which they recanted before the Lutherans, both orally and in writing. — Yet Zwingli was not ashamed, even in the year 1531, the year of his violent death, expressly to assert that hypocritical dissembling had prevailed on his side at that time. "I know," he writes to Samius, "it is not unknown to you, that at the Lord's Supper only those are fed with the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ who have already been spiritually fed and satisfied beforehand. But, as I have said, one had to express some things somewhat more mildly and cautiously, and cast out the net of the Gospel shrewdly, in order to make all the greater catch. The occasion will come one day to clear everything away down to the ground." A truly wicked piece of advice indeed, says Dr. Löscher on this, to make all the more Zwinglians under the guise of Lutheranism.

This faithlessness of the Reformed toward our people soon revealed itself in ever more hostile deeds. "I will remain silent," Luther already had to complain a mere half a year after the Marburg Colloquy, in a letter to the Landgrave Philip of Hesse of May 20, 1530, "as to how unkindly they (the Reformed) now deal with us; they take Carlstadt to themselves, believe all the palpable lies which that wretched man has invented against us, and it must be reckoned well done, and they defend him — God knows how long." And to Jakob Propst he writes on June 1, 1530: "That the Sacramentarians boast that I was overcome at Marburg, they do according to their kind. For they are not only liars, but lying itself, full of cunning and hypocritical deceit, as Carlstadt and Zwingli themselves demonstrate and attest, both by their words and by their deeds. But you see that at Marburg, in the articles drawn up, they recanted what they had until then taught, in a harmful and poisonous manner, in their public printed books, concerning baptism and the use of the sacraments, and also concerning the outward work or the office of preaching and other matters. We recant nothing at all. But since they were also overcome on the article of the Lord's Supper, they were unwilling to recant it, although they already saw that they could not maintain it: for they were afraid of their own common people, to whom they would not have dared to return home again if they had recanted. . . They have shown and comported themselves toward us with unbelievable humility and friendliness; but, as is now becoming evident, all false and deceitful, only so that they might draw us into a semblance and appearance of concord, and make us partakers of their error and patrons — that is, protectors — of it. Oh, how cunning is Satan! But Christ, who has preserved us, is wiser. I have now ceased to be amazed when they lie without any shame. I see that they cannot do otherwise, and I am glad of it, because I see that Satan rules and leads them, so that they now betray themselves no longer by cunning, but by open lies." Thus it was not mere mendacity alone, but also fear of man, that was the reason why the Reformed, some time afterward, partly twisted and partly denied the truth to which they had committed themselves by their signature to those fifteen articles — as their writings, unfortunately, all too clearly attest.

Concerning baptism, it was established in the ninth Marburg Article as common doctrine: "That baptism is a sacrament instituted by God for faith, and because God's command — Go and baptize — and God's promise are contained therein: he who believes [shall be saved] — it is therefore not a mere empty sign or token among Christians, but a sign and work of God, in which our faith is furthered, through which we are born again unto life. And in the fourteenth article: that the baptism of children is right, and that they —