# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1860_S279
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A Scriptural Proof against the Union. 279

— proclaimed it. Yet it is not at all a question of the belief or unbelief of the individual members of a falsely teaching church, which in the end is known only to the knower of hearts; rather, it is a question of the position which this falsely teaching church, through this its false doctrine, takes up in relation to the truth of the divine Word. Every false doctrine has its ground in the kingdom of darkness, in the father of lies, and is a testimony of unbelief toward the revealed truth. If, then, the Reformed church, faced with the testimony of the truth which it possesses in the confessional writings of the Lutheran church, holds fast to the false doctrine and confesses it as truth, it thereby bears witness to its own unbelief. Whether, and how far, this is shared in the guilt of the individual members of the Reformed church — who can judge that? But just as, on the one hand, the faith of all those to whom the truth has not been, or not yet sufficiently, testified in opposition to the false doctrine ought not to be called into doubt, so, on the other hand, we may not refuse to acknowledge unbelief wherever someone nevertheless holds fast to false doctrine in the face of sufficiently attested truth. For only insofar as a person lets himself be drawn by the Spirit of God and guided in the truth from one degree of clarity to the next is he a believer, and insofar as he resists the Spirit of God and the truth in this or that point, to that extent he is an unbeliever. Thus it can indeed happen that someone lets himself be drawn by the Holy Spirit for one or ten years; he progresses from one degree of clarity to the next; he grows in knowledge to a certain degree. To that extent he has been a believer. But now certain aspects of revelation or of the truth confront him, in the face of which he will not let his reason be taken captive under the obedience of faith; he is therefore, at least in this point, an unbeliever. If the Holy Spirit does not overcome this natural unbelief, then things will indeed soon go backward with such a person in his life of faith; outwardly he may still, for a longer or shorter time, let a certain appearance of faith come forward — he may still say "Lord, Lord," may still show great zeal in converting others, and all this may still proceed from a certain conviction — while all the time unbelief has already begun to destroy his inner life of faith.

From all this it will sufficiently appear that the application of the saying, "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers," to the relation of Christians to one another, and in particular to the relation of the Lutheran church to the Reformed, in no way pronounces a judgment upon the faith or unbelief of the individual members on either side. But on the other hand it would be a base denial of the truth if one were unwilling to call the doctrinal difference of the Reformed church what it actually is, namely false doctrine — which, however, as such comes out of unbelief and has its ultimate ground in Belial, and is therefore darkness! If that is not supposed to be correct, then we may as well no longer say that our catechism agrees with God's Word and