# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1860_S143
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheran Church and the Union. 143

is the fixed point from which he begins his work and which remains until its end — his positive doctrine of salvation. In Zwingli, conversely, the fixed point is the extirpation of human ordinances, and what results as a positive answer is to him still unknown from the outset and results only in the course of development, and indeed by manifold change. Zwingli's activity, Stahl maintains, was at first, and before Luther had proclaimed the doctrine of salvation, merely negative — merely preaching against abuses and human ordinances, but not preaching the gospel of repentance and justifying faith. "No proof has yet been given that Zwingli, before 1520, proclaimed any of the evangelical truths of salvation, and it may certainly be assumed that of the most positive and most specific truth of the evangelical Church — justification by faith — he as yet had no notion. The abolition of human ordinances and of superstition, and an upright walk of life in place of outward ceremonies, was the predominant impulse of his activity. .. Only later, and only gradually (certainly not before 1520), did Zwingli advance from negation to position, from the attack on pilgrimage, the cult of Mary, and fasting, to a preaching of the way of salvation. By that time the fullness of evangelical saving truth had already been set forth by Luther, with all Europe shaken by it, and it is hard to believe that this did not touch Zwingli at all, or exercise any influence on him." "But even afterward, when Zwingli, supported by Luther's example, proclaimed the evangelical doctrine of salvation, he proclaimed it — quite apart from the later sacramental controversy — nevertheless not with the purity and depth that Luther did; he did not proclaim what both churches, the Reformed and the Lutheran, now confess as evangelical doctrine."

After Stahl has carried this out further, he describes (in chapter 2) Zwingli's supreme principle. Whereas with Luther it is justification by faith, with Zwingli it is the thought: salvation from God alone, without the means of churchly acts. "He accordingly eagerly accepts the evangelical doctrines that are compatible with his thinking (from Luther) — for example, the doctrine of man's inability to do good. On the other hand he rejects from the outset everything that seems to endanger his thinking — the sacraments and the power of the keys. For the very same reason he insists that divine attributes are not communicated to the human nature in Christ, and that it can be entitled to no worship. For the very same reason he rejects every artistic means for worship: images, crosses, indeed even singing." The collision of the two reformations then followed, naturally and necessarily, over the doctrine of the sacrament. Those fundamental ideas which led him into opposition and breach with Luther led him at last still further — even beyond the standpoint which he himself had held throughout his whole reformatory activity and in the writings of his best period — out to the doctrine of predestination. "He takes the step to predestination, however, solely in order to break down the doctrine of the sacraments, so as to demonstrate the impossibility of a grace-working effect of the sacraments in an absolute