# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1858_S35
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

"Luther or Arndt!" 35

truth, he preferred to let himself be persecuted and hounded by the Calvinists. When he was likewise reminded of suspect turns of phrase, he took it in a gentle spirit, admitted the faults, and protested both by word and in writing that he wished his books to be understood in no other way than according to Holy Scripture and our symbolic church books. Yet the dear man had not had time at the universities to lay a firm foundation in godliness, for he had first studied medicine, and had diligently read the writings of the theological bungler Paracelsus, thereby absorbing a love for other mystical books. And because these, under fine, lofty, profound, and newly coined words, harbor much impurity within themselves, and because enthusiast writings too are whitewashed with just such loose plaster, something of it stuck to the good Arndt when he afterward turned to theology. Now as for his books on true Christianity in particular, he himself does not deny that incautious turns of phrase have crept into them, and he confesses that he took twelve chapters from the arch-enthusiast Weigel, of whom, however, he did not know that in the book referred to he says almost nothing of faith — without which, indeed, there can be no true Christianity — but instead builds, mostly and almost throughout, upon a blameless life .... Yet this might still pass, if only the book were free of unsound turns of phrase. Though one can, at a pinch, excuse most of them and help them along with a convenient interpretation, there are nevertheless some to be found which cannot stand together with the analogy of faith and the model of wholesome doctrine, and which therefore cannot possibly be approved. Are we not to think that sober and cautious theologians had cause to raise a reminder concerning this book? So I say accordingly: if people of practiced discernment read it, they can certainly make good use of it, and easily clear out of the way whatever strikes them as offensive; but I am also entirely persuaded in my own mind that, because it is written in a difficult style and filled with many lofty and obscure turns of phrase, the simple will neither understand it nor draw from it the benefit supposed." — For all my indifference toward the Buffalo mischief, I can, in the above utterance, recognize only the general voice of the genuinely Lutheran past, and, in the previously cited statements of the "Lutheraner," a departure from it, a tacit protest against it. There lies here, undeniably, a difference of principle, which, however, out of considerate regard, I wish to set forth only in a personified form. According to the "Lutheraner" it must be said: Luther and Arndt! But our believing forefathers ask, alternatively: Luther? or Arndt? Of them, Arndt was never counted among the normally "faithful" teachers of the Church; that this is done today, and not only in America but perhaps still more in Germany, is itself evidence of the disharmony in which one finds oneself with the churchly past. Arndt is no teacher in the sense and spirit of the Reformation. Now, to be sure, he claims, in rejec-