# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1862_S195
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Report on the Right Mean of the Lutheran Liturgy. 195

seeks apostolic usage, ruthlessly rejects everything that became churchly practice in the post-apostolic period, and thereby breaks radically with history and at the same time throws open door and gate to the arbitrariness that escalates all the way to vandalism.

Luther, Against the Heavenly Prophets: "Just as we have for this very reason shown the pope to be the Antichrist, that he breaks such liberty with laws where Christ wills to have liberty, so my fanatic spirit [Rottengeist] plunges into that very same path, likewise wanting to capture what Christ wills to have free. But in this matter it stands otherwise with the fanatic spirit than with the pope — they both break Christian liberty, and are both anti-Christian; but the pope does it through command, Dr. Karlstadt through prohibition; the pope commands doing, Dr. Karlstadt commands leaving undone: for Christian liberty is broken by these two ways alike, whether one commands, compels, and forces the doing of what is nevertheless neither commanded nor required by God, or whether one forbids, restrains, and hinders the leaving undone of what is nevertheless neither forbidden nor restrained by God: for my conscience is just as much taken captive and led astray when it must leave something undone that there is no need to leave undone, as when it must do something that there is no need to do; and Christian liberty likewise perishes just as much when it must leave undone what it need not leave undone, as when it must do what it need not do. . . .

Now the elevation of the sacrament, wearing the tonsure, putting on chasuble and alb, etc., is a doing about which God has commanded nothing and forbidden nothing; therefore it shall be free to whoever is so minded, to do it or to leave it; such liberty God wills to have, etc. But because the pope does not leave this doing free, but forces it by teaching and command, he thereby seizes God's office and audaciously sets himself in God's place, as St. Paul foretold of him, 2 Thessalonians 2:4, and makes sin where God will have no sin, and thereby kills souls and binds consciences. But because Dr. Karlstadt likewise does not leave the leaving-undone free, but forces it with prohibition and teaching, that one should not elevate it, etc., he too seizes God's office, sets himself in his place, and makes sin where no sin can or should be, and thus kills the soul on this side, just as the pope does on that side; both alike, like murderers of souls, break Christian liberty. But we walk the middle path and say: neither commanding nor forbidding holds, neither to the right nor to the left; we are neither papist nor Karlstadtian, but free and Christian, so that we elevate the sacrament how, where, when, and for as long as we please, as God has given us the liberty to do. Just as we are free to remain outside of marriage or to enter into marriage, to wear a chasuble or not, to have cowls and tonsures or not. Here we are lords and suffer no law, command, teaching, or prohibition. As indeed we have practiced both ways here at Wittenberg. For in the monastery we held Mass without chasuble, without elevation, quite in the very simplest manner, as Karlstadt praises Christ's example. Again, in the parish [church] we still have