# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1844 11 02_S20
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

to the field against it, conquer it gloriously, and then cry out: Behold, there lie the poor rogues, the Christians, in the dust! Behold, thus must one fight and conquer for light, freedom, and the happiness of nations, and shrink from no danger, not even for one's own life. This vividly recalls that Spanish knight of fortune.

We now ask, however, who has ever claimed that there are three Gods, and yet also only one? In which Bible does that stand written? In which church confession have the unbelievers ever read that? What Christian theologian has ever taught any such thing? — This doctrine is to be found nowhere except in the confused heads of the scoffers. — We Christians are, thank God, all wise enough to know very well that one cannot say Yes and No, black and white, of one and the same thing at the same time, without incurring the reproach of having refuted oneself. Luther already says: "Thank God, we are not such geese, blockheads, or stones as the senseless fools take us for, as though we did not know that One God and many gods cannot both be believed to be true at the same time." (XX, 2506.) But the holy, divine Word nowhere demands that we believe that. It does not present to us the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as a company of three infinite beings; rather, the Bible teaches us that God is, in different respects, one and three — one with respect to the divine essence, three with respect to the personal relations. Now if, in one and the same thing, more than one is already found in a certain other respect, it can still be a single thing, just as in one soul, understanding, will, and desires are perceived.

But, some may perhaps say here, you Christians claim, according to Scripture, that the Son and the Holy Spirit are not mere powers and attributes, but that in the being of God there are three distinct persons who hold the divine being in common! Who can grasp that? We answer: no created being can, indeed, grasp that — but is what goes beyond the bounds of reason therefore against the laws of reason? Is such a mystery to be rejected on that account? And is the Bible itself to be rejected for the sake of such a mystery contained within it? Truly, a man can no longer lay claim to reason who denies that reason has bounds, and that there is a field in which its power of comprehension ceases.

Are there not already countless mysteries in visible nature, which everyone believes and against which no one cares to argue with grounds of reason, because he perceives their existence through his senses? How, then, can we take offense that the doctrine dealing with the inner relations of the being of God contains mysteries that appear incomprehensible to us? Would we not laugh at the simplemindedness of a child who found fault with all sorts of things in some artificial piece of machinery, since it does not know, nor can grasp, the inner workings of it and the often absolute

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necessity of a single screw or valve? But is not our understanding, in relation to God's understanding, infinitely smaller than the understanding of a child compared with that of a skilled mechanic? — A scoffer may possess excellent knowledge in other sciences and yet perhaps not be familiar with the teachings of mathematics, physics, and astronomy; would such a man reject a book on those latter branches of human knowledge simply because, on leafing through it, so much still seemed incomprehensible to him? Certainly not — he would be afraid of being laughed at, in such a case, by the relevant scholars as a presumptuous ignoramus. And yet we would wish to reject the Book of God because it contains teachings that are mysteries to our shortsighted understanding! Should we not, rather, conceive the highest suspicion of a book that announced itself as a revelation of God, if it contained nothing incomprehensible in it, but only what our reason could know without the light of revelation? A God who is not wonderful, a comprehensible God, is no God. His light is darkness to us, his day is night to us, for we lack the eye to gaze into this sun of all spirits. Whatever is of the nature of creatures is not creative; the divine only begins precisely where the incomprehensible begins. Just as God does not dwell in temples made by human hands, so neither does he dwell in the thoughts of men; it makes no difference whether an idol is carved or cast by a carpenter out of wood, by a goldsmith out of metal, or by a philosopher out of his own hollow concepts.

Our scoffers certainly imagine they have accomplished something great when they set forth how incomprehensible the doctrines of Scripture are. But heaping up difficulties here is a very poor art; even a blockhead can have talent for that. We Christians feel, just as much, in our own hearts, that God's wisdom seems to be foolishness to our natural reason. But because we know that we are human, we humbly believe God's revelations, even when they infinitely surpass all our power of comprehension. Because we know that the Bible is God's eternal Word, confirmed irrefutably by miracles and prophecies, we therefore believe a single saying of it more than whole cartloads of books in which millions of misgivings are piled up. Let the world laugh or rage — it is all the same to us — one word of Christ, of the apostles, and of the prophets stands higher for us than all the wisdom of the wisest of this world, wherever it contradicts that divine voice; indeed, however splendidly it may adorn itself, it is then nothing to us but foolishness and folly.

(To be continued.)

Some Theses of Luther against the Abuse of Indulgences.

Our readers have certainly already heard more than once of those ninety-five theses which the blessed Luther, in the year 1517, on October 31, nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Saxony, and that these, through God's governance, were the first foundation stone of the great work of the Reformation; but not a few, perhaps, have never had the opportunity to read these theses themselves. It is important to be able to see from them, not only what degree of evangelical understanding Luther had attained at that time, but also what was really at stake right from the very beginning of that period. We therefore give here some of the most important among those theses.

The first reads as follows: "When our Master and Lord, Jesus Christ, says, Repent, etc., he wills that the whole life of his believers on earth should be a constant, or unceasing, repentance."

The twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth: "They preach human folly who claim that, as soon as the coin thrown into the chest rings, the soul at once flies out of purgatory. This is certain: as soon as the coin rings in the chest, gain and greed can increase and grow greater; but the help, or the intercession, of the Church rests solely in God's will and good pleasure."

The thirty-second: "Those will go to the devil, together with their masters, who imagine themselves certain of their salvation through letters of indulgence."

The thirty-fourth: "The grace conveyed by indulgences has regard only to the penalty of satisfaction that has been imposed by men."

The thirty-seventh: "Every true Christian, whether living or dead, has a share in all the blessings of Christ and of the Church, as a gift of God, even without letters of indulgence."

The forty-fifth: "Christians are to be taught that he who sees his neighbor in need and, in spite of this, buys indulgences, does not buy the pope's indulgence but brings upon himself God's displeasure."

The fifty-second: "To trust that one will be saved through letters of indulgence is a vain and false thing, even if the indulgence-agent, indeed even the pope himself, wished to pledge his own soul for it."

The sixty-second: "The true, real treasure of the Church is the Holy Gospel of the glory and grace of God."

Conclusion: "I am not so rash as to wish that my opinion be preferred absolutely to that of all others; but neither am I so unreasonable as to let the divine Word be placed after the fables invented by human reason."

The "Lutheran" can always be obtained at the residence of the carrier, Mr. Gräber
(South Fifth Street, opposite the oil mill), also at Mr. Quast's (Olive Street, between the
second and third, below the theater), and from the editor.

Printed by Weber and Olshausen.