# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1847 11 16_S44
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— namely Christ's life, suffering, and death — that is the eternal, golden foundation of faith and hope, upon which our Church teaches all sinners to build.

There are, accordingly, two reproaches that have been made against our Church from of old down to the present day. She is reproached, namely, for holding too strictly, too anxiously, and too rigidly to the letter, and for knowing how to teach nothing but faith in Christ. But how could our opponents praise our Church more highly than with such reproaches! In this, the enemies themselves, as unbiased witnesses, unwittingly give our Church the most glorious testimony and set the seal upon it that she is Christ's true Church; for these are exactly the marks by which she is recognized — that she does not depart from the divine documents of her founding, and knows and wants to know nothing but Christ crucified.

So it is, then, undeniable: the Evangelical Lutheran Church is the true Church of Christ on earth; for she too has kept the praise which Christ, in our text, gives to His Church at Philadelphia, which remained faithful: "Thou hast kept My word, and hast not denied My name." She is not a new church, first founded 300 years ago by Luther; no, far from it! — she is the risen, ancient, apostolic Church, which Luther, with the spade of the Word, has merely dug out again, like a city that had lain buried. What, then, do those do who fall away from the Evangelical Lutheran Church? First, they become perjurers, for they break the oath which they swore to the true Church at their baptism and at their confirmation. They separate themselves outwardly, not from a party founded by men, but from the little flock of the rightly believing, from that small flock to which Christ has given the promise that it is the Father's good pleasure to give it the kingdom, and from the fellowship of those to whom Christ has promised that He will be with them until the end of the days. They separate themselves from the truth and from its confessors; indeed, they separate themselves from Christ's body, and thus from Christ Himself, the invisible Head of His holy Church.*

* This will perhaps seem to many to be saying too much. Some may perhaps think that this denies grace and salvation, without exception, to all who are not outwardly found within the Lutheran Church. This, however, is by no means the case. One need only consider the matter rightly. What has been said above by no means denies that Christ has members of His Church even within the sects, since the sects, too, still essentially retain God's Word, whereby many a soul, despite all the errors current within them, still comes to justifying faith. But since the sects are not sects because they still essentially have God's Word and still teach many important articles of the Christian faith, but rather because they have rejected certain important articles, adopted and established errors, and separated themselves from the rightly believing — so likewise every Lutheran separates himself from the truth and from Christ insofar as he forsakes the rightly believing Lutheran church and publicly attaches himself to such a sect. Whether such an apostate, in his heart, remains with Christ and His truth, and, out of simplicity or weakness, because he did not see through the difference, only let himself be outwardly enticed into the sect — as once some in the band of Absalom's rebels (2 Sam. 15:11) — that God knows.

2.

Yet this now leads me to the second part of our consideration — that we should also let nothing move us to fall away from our Evangelical Lutheran Church, because faithful perseverance in this Church brings unspeakable blessing, but falling away from her brings inescapable curse.

It is, my beloved, indeed not to be denied that among those who here leave the Evangelical Lutheran Church and turn to the sects, there are certainly some who do so precisely because they think thereby to provide better for the salvation of their souls. This comes about because in our German fatherland there are only too many so-called Lutheran preachers who do not themselves believe the Word of God and Lutheran doctrine, who therefore preach only human word instead of God's Word, only a heathen morality or doctrine of virtue instead of Lutheran doctrine; who do not show their hearers the way to salvation; who say not a word of true repentance, nothing of what true, saving faith in Christ is and how a person must set about coming to this faith and being justified and made blessed before God. Instead of the bread of life, they offer them stones. Alas, it is only too evident that not a few preachers in our German homeland are wretched hirelings, who carry on the holy office only for the sake of bread, only for the sake of the belly, who therefore do not themselves walk the narrow way, but hold with the world, join in its amusements, and go ahead on the broad way to hell, and so, by their ungodly conduct, grievously offend and mislead their poor hearers. Thus it has come about among Germans that countless people call themselves Lutherans who do not know the Lutheran Church and its doctrine, who take the den of murderers into which unbelieving preachers have transformed our church for the Lutheran Church, and who take the sapless and powerless doctrine of virtue which they have heard from youth up for Lutheran doctrine. Now when such neglected, inexperienced, and ignorant Lutherans come to America, and see here the zeal of the sect-preachers, see how repentance, conversion, change of heart, and rebirth are urged there, how they pray and sing there, how they struggle and toil there, and the like, then such inexperienced people suppose that only now have they come to know the true servants of Christ, that only now do they see what true Christianity is, that only now has the true Church become manifest to them. So they leave their Lutheran church, and, in order to provide better for their souls, join a false-believing fellowship.

Such inexperienced people leave their rightly believing Lutheran mother church because they have never come to know her. But do they find what they seek? Alas, no! It is true that the sects, too, still have some divine truth, for from the fountain of the Reformation the whole world has again been watered with the water of life, but it has been muddied by human doctrine and human doings. The souls who are truly initiated into the spirit of the sects are led away from trust in the Word and the holy sacraments, and are seduced into a false trust in their own doing — in repentance, contrition, remorse, sanctification — and are taught to put the wavering feelings and sentiments of the deceitful heart in the place of the means of grace ordained by God.

Now it is indeed true that being bodily within the outward fellowship of the rightly believing Church does not by itself make anyone blessed; indeed, Christ says that many will one day come from the east and from the west who will sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, but that the children of the kingdom themselves — that is, many outward members of the true Church — will be cast out into outer darkness; for he who knows the Lord's will and has not prepared himself shall receive many stripes. But whoever holds not merely outwardly to the rightly believing Church, but also accepts her pure evangelical doctrine in true faith and faithfully perseveres with her, already has from this an unspeakable blessing even here. He has a divine certainty of his salvation and, in all afflictions and temptations, rich comfort. Though his own heart may condemn him, he holds to the Word. However many false prophets may arise and lead many astray, he does not let himself be swayed and tossed by every wind of doctrine. To him applies Christ's promise in our text: "Because thou hast kept the word of My patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth." So then, as often as great temptations come upon the whole of Christendom, countless will fall and be lost, but not he who has kept the word of Christ's patience; he carries the true, victorious armor and weapon, the Word. That is the rock on which he stands firm; that is the anchor which he holds fast, and which never breaks for him, even when death, like the unfathomable depth of the sea, opens before him. Yes, with the Word he overcomes sin, world, doubt, anguish, the terrors of hell, distress, and death.

Look back to the time of the Reformation: what made Luther, and all who accepted his testimony, so joyful, so certain, so blessed, that they took no account of reproach and persecution, of the threats and enmity of the whole world and its powerful ones, indeed of death itself? It was the Word; that was the joy and comfort of their hearts.

Yet, my beloved, there are also those who leave our Church because they fear that, through strict adherence to the Word of God, their