# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1860_S278
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

278 A Scriptural Proof against the Union.

the apostle now grounds, in his second epistle, chapter 6:14, by the general truth cited above: "light and darkness, Christ and Belial, have no fellowship with one another." All idolatry whatsoever has its origin not in God but in the prince of darkness. But for this the light has come into the world, that it might "be the judgment" (John 3:19), that is, that it might carry out the separation; light and darkness, truth and lie, must be kept separate from one another. And this is the work of the Holy Spirit in the Christian church, his office of reproof (John 16:8): that he lets the light shine through the preaching of the Word, that is, through the confessing of the truth, and brings to the light (that is, gathers) all who are of the truth, and thereby separates out all who love darkness more than light, until the sifting and separating shall be made manifest as complete on the last day. For this very reason we should never and nowhere wish to mix and mingle light and darkness, truth and lie, with one another. And wherever, in the midst of Christendom, people presume to do this nonetheless, the holy apostle's warning question applies: what fellowship hath light with darkness? Consequently one may not say that this saying of St. Paul refers only to the relation of Christians to the heathen, and not to the relation of Christians to one another. Not so at all! "Light hath no fellowship with darkness" is a general truth which St. Paul applies to the dealings of the Corinthian Christians with the heathen. By that same divine right, this truth must come to be applied wherever, anywhere in the whole world, it is sinned against.

In application of this general truth, and thus by divine right, the Reformers were bound to have no fellowship with the Roman church. In application of this truth, the church in general may have no fellowship with any false doctrine whatever. In application of this truth, and thus by divine right, the Lutheran church may have no church fellowship with the Reformed church. Against this, however, one now indeed objects that whoever sets up this word of the apostle, "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers," as proof that the Union is sin, thereby declares the Reformed to be unbelievers — just as, indeed, there is no lack of the malicious slander that we Lutherans hold the Reformed church to be the kingdom of Belial or the kingdom of darkness. I say, that is a malicious slander. We hold the Reformed church to be neither the kingdom of Belial nor an assembly of nothing but unbelievers. We know very well that there are many believing children of God within it; we also know that at a time when, in dear Pomerania, the Lutheran church was a field full of dead men's bones, and the rationalistic preaching of its pastors had sung and lulled all life to sleep in death — that at that time two Reformed pastors, to the deep shame of the Lutheran church, proclaimed the bloody merit of the Son of God as the sole ground of our blessedness,