# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1847 06 29_S122
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— not of this world, just as also is His overthrow of the enemy; His reign is a spiritual and invisible one.

God is and remains incomprehensible to us; His being and His working are as inexplicable as our own existence.

The foundation of the rock on which we are built, the stone of stumbling and rock of offense, the stone which the builders — the bishops and their councils — rejected, the chosen and, to believers, precious cornerstone, remains Jesus Christ alone, although we do not see Him; yet it is upon His heavenly word that individual faith sets its confidence and grounds its hope.

Everything, in the struggle against the Roman Church, comes down to this: Can we be, and become, divinely and infallibly certain of the holy doctrine of the prophets and apostles, so that we could even seal it with our blood, without needing an authority mediated through men and their interpretation? Can we believe, and risk upon this faith everything — goods and blood, body and life — inasmuch as we have received testimony from God Himself, as did the beloved ancients (Heb. ch. 11, entirely), without needing any visible institution whose stately assurances would have to carry more weight and authority for us than the testimony of the divine Spirit Himself, in His Word, to our spirit — which is greater than our heart and than all human speech — the testimony that God has given us eternal life, and that this life is in His Son, and that whoever does not believe this testimony makes God a liar? (1 John ch. 5.)

There is, indeed, for the wise according to the flesh and the strong ones of this world — if they do not attain to the simplicity of faith and the divine election of grace in the Spirit, and yet are truly thinkers — no other alternative, as the writer in the Wahrheitsfreund also seems to note, than either to become theoretical deniers of God, idealists, self-deifiers, pantheists, or to take their reason captive under church authority; for which reason the conversions of the most eminent men of their time (for we will not count the lesser minds here) not infrequently occur, and the Roman Church, accordingly, boasts and speaks as confidently as is written beforehand in Rev. 18:7: "I sit a queen, and shall be no widow, and shall see no sorrow." Persons of deeply penetrating philosophical acuity and power of speculation cannot possibly content themselves with the ordinary proofs for the truth of natural and revealed religion, just as so-called supernatural Protestantism — I do not mean that of the Reformers, who awakened their slumbering century, nor of those who follow in their footsteps — contents itself with its learned, often very censorious routine, one that squints disparagingly and suspiciously at everything nobler. All proceeding from rational argumentation, from a corresponding interpretation of language, and from history, is an inevitable support of the papacy. Man wants to see what he is to believe, and this desire leads him into —

What presents itself to us as faith borrows its own convincing power not from theoretical cognition, not from imagined research and official gifting, or presumption of wisdom and choice of worship — which leads only to scornful pedantry, bigoted character, a fixation on the visible, and withered prejudices. If knowledge were the guide to faith, why is faith older and more living, through the fresh breath of the Spirit, than any system?*) Neither the certainty of a revelation having occurred, nor the manner in which we are to understand it, can be demonstrated by human proofs; they cannot attain to evidence. Every concept of the finite understanding that tries to think God and divine things sinks back powerless into nothing; no human power is able of itself to grasp and take hold of Him; He is unattainable in His height and in His sanctuary. If you feel, O man, this greatness and glory, if your spirit becomes full of wonder and silence, why would you wish to condition the Unconditioned and make possible the Impossible, and thereby destroy for yourself the Infinite, thereby annihilating for yourself all religion — or, mediating the Immediate, as a hollow support for your inconsistent, indolent reason, because the mighty impulses of your heart all point toward a lost Highest, take to the aid of human tradition and authorities in order to find the God whom every tongue of creation proclaims to you, whose existence you cannot deny without denying your own, by virtue of whose powerfully effective presence you cannot feel yourself without also feeling Him — and why not rather, presupposing both to be, though unproven, decidedly true in advance, let yourself be led by the hands of unspeakable grace, so that, according to divine foreordination, there may arise in you the illumination that comes from the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ? (Acts 17:22ff.; 2 Cor. 4:6.) The desire of self-conceit, which through unbelief has brought sin into the world and makes itself its own god, moves man, instead of becoming certain immediately in the Spirit through childlike trust in the Word, to seek his salvation in bare human powers and capacities; the voice of his innermost natural consciousness (Rom. 2:14ff.; 1:32, 19ff.) he wishes to interpret by his own reason and strength; the ground of the visible he will not disown or forsake; palpable conviction is to replace for him the certainty of faith that is at home only in the invisible, from above; he wants, theoretically, through proofs a priori or a posteriori (that is, from metaphysics or from history and tradition), practically with invented works of self-sanctification or

*) Augustine: Fides praecedit intellectum — Faith precedes knowledge.

of sensual superstition, to put together and construct a religious whole for himself; and when these rotten pillars collapse under the closed course of a demonstration conducted from the pure principles of thought, then it is all over with his supposed faith too. He falls.

What reason has not built, no reason can ever destroy either; if human science neither knows nor gives faith, how could it overthrow and annihilate it? Faith in something higher and more sublime than man himself springs from an entirely different domain than that of human deductive power. In fearful contradiction stands the finished result of a consistent speculation with the mysterious, original language of our consciousness. That is the point of contact at which the revelation of God's merciful love attaches itself, where man needs this attachment, to the voice of conscience, through Law and Gospel, without which it is impossible to raise man above himself and his narrowly confined circle; the system returns into itself and describes only its own circle, begins with the "I" of man and ends with the same, and man is his own god, and the god of the world is man. (The chain from transcendental to absolute idealism, that is, consummate pantheism, or from the self-consistent Kant and Fichte to Schelling and Hegel.)

Revelation can speak to faith only in the full meaning of the word; it can only say, unmediated: It is — believe! Through, for, and with it, faith in it is always likewise given in the very act of appropriation — the divine power, anticipatory of man, of that revelation; only the capacity for it, that is, the need of it, is in man. If revelation draws its proofs from human reason, work, feeling, testimony, authority, then it is no longer a divine revelation, has no universally necessary character — and this becomes the fundamental sin of all erring philosophy, as it mixes into the whole realm of sectarianism: the deification of itself, of the creature; the setting of itself in the temple of God as a god; the principle of the god of this world in Antichristendom. Faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit, the endowment of the true, universal Church, weak or strong in greater or lesser measure in man. It is the laying hold of the invisible, the unbreakable foundation of all that is future; hence the congregation of believers is a pillar and ground of the truth; for what is visible is temporal, contingent, mere appearance, but what is invisible is eternal, truly valid. Faith alone leads, surely and safely, through the reefs of popery, of so-called Protestantism with all its excrescences, of atheism, to the glorious goal; it is the faith of a Paul, an Athanasius, an Augustine, a Luther, and their spiritual children.

A great, inexpressible gain lies in