# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 03 07_S109
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

…His own who remain faithful to him, and knows how to save them. "But so that you may nevertheless perceive where this honest man has had to keep house these thirteen years, you shall not, as he did, have your stay there for thirteen years, but only for thirteen days, in the place where he spent his thirteen years; after the passing of the thirteen days you shall have your freedom."*) The General fell silent.

But his order was carried out at once: the Rector was taken to the Rondel and there confined in the very manner that he and his like had once done to "God-Faithful" Felsner. — Of him we now have something very delightful to report.

For the Easter season was now approaching, and the Lord granted this his old, faithful servant the great grace that on holy Easter Day he was able once more to preach an Easter sermon in the town church of Olmütz in the presence of many thousands of people, and to speak as a wonderful, living witness of the risen Prince of Victory, who by his almighty word had also kept him alive in his grave. Three weeks later the Lord Jesus brought this pious and faithful servant to his eternal rest.

General Winter had him buried most splendidly in a vault located before the high altar of the town church at Olmütz, and had an exceedingly costly monument of marble made for him, and also had his portrait hung in the church in remembrance. When, however, after the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia (1648) the Swedes left Olmütz again, all this was destroyed and completely ruined by the Papists, so that no trace of it remains.

It scarcely needs mentioning that when, after thirteen days, the Rondel was opened again in order to let the Rector out, if he were still alive, he was found dead and in a state of decay. J. N.

*) A more recent account of this remarkable event states that the General had the Rector's sentence pronounced by a court-martial, which decided that he should die of starvation in the very cell that he had intended for Felsner's grave. At the urgent pleading of Felsner and the army chaplain, however, the General mitigated the sentence so that he should be walled in for only eight days, with a sufficient supply of bread and water. — The older source used in the text also appears to have been known and used by Rieger in his History of the Bohemian Brethren, vol. 3, p. 49.

(Submitted.)
A Rejection of Those Who Would Have Our Church Give Up Its Attachment to the Confessional Writings!
(From the October issue of the Journal for Protestantism and Church.)

— This much we do say — and this right our church must be granted — that we hold our confession to be true so long as it is not refuted or corrected!

And we likewise insist that the teachers in our church shall not preach to the congregations whatever pleases them, but shall confess the common faith of our church as their own; we do not wish to throw open the door and gate to arbitrariness, so that one man proclaims: Christ is God's only-begotten Son, of equal power and glory with the Father, while another says: nothing more is thereby stated than that he was an exceptionally gifted man; and that the one, no less than the other, within one and the same church, could claim the right to preach so.*)

Does someone not share the faith of the church in which he holds the teaching office? Then, as an honest man, he will give it up, or not seek it in the first place. But if he does share it, then it will be no "slavish submission" and no "unmediated assertion" that speaks from his sermons, but rather the faith of his own heart, which is one with the faith of the church. If a slavish submission were wanted, why would the future teachers of the church (in Germany) be made to study theology? What sense does the requirement of this study have, other than that one wishes them to obtain, by way of their own research and scholarly deepening in the Scriptures, a free conviction of the truth of our faith! For this purpose the means are placed at their disposal, in the good confidence that our confession need not fear the light of scholarship — otherwise it would be better to lock them up in training academies, and to erect clerical seminaries instead of theological faculties. It truly grows wearisome to have to repeat again and again what has already been said, clear and simple; and believing men, at the very least, ought at last to be able to overcome their preconceived prejudices far enough not to join in the chorus that demands the church tear down entirely the last fence and defense around herself, so that the work of destruction spoken of in Psalm 80:13-14 might proceed not merely still more unhindered — which can scarcely be imagined — but even with the full claim of complete right.

Indeed, let theological scholarship immerse itself with wholly free devotion in the Scripture; let it strive unceasingly to reproduce the entire content of it; let it allow its drive for research and its scholarly calling to be bound by no restrictions other than those which the object of research itself directly imposes upon it! And it has indeed done so — thanks be to rationalism! I say this, on one side, in full earnest: it has indeed truly shattered all the hindering enclosures of received propositions and doctrines (the "accidental formulas of past centuries," as they are called) and has in fact emancipated theology from all of them! But what was the result? Nothing more and nothing less than a complete confirmation, gained by the path of renewed free inquiry, of each and every principal tenet of our old confession — a new and solemn seal upon its truth, won in the hottest struggle with a criticism to which nothing was too sacred to try its dissecting-knife upon. And in the face of such results, one nonetheless demands of the church that she abandon precisely this good confession, that she no longer trouble herself over upholding it, and that she surrender the holy office of the proclamation of the Word to every spirit, whatever testimony he may carry within him, so long as he still appeals, merely pro forma, to Scripture — all this only so that she might not fall under the reproach of binding minds in slavish submission to the tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when, fortunately, the truth was brought into the clear light! Theologians who carry on their research in the fear of the Lord certainly have the least reason to complain of the pressure of any "compulsion of the symbols"; only those spirits who, in their own self-will, pursue paths of their own choosing sometimes find it burdensome; but they know well enough how to help themselves otherwise, and they have no right to demand that regard for the welfare and the rightful continuance of the whole church be subordinated to indulgence toward their own instability and immaturity.

If the decline of the old church discipline is so often lamented, how is this to be reconciled with the demand that the last, badly stunted remnant, the last remaining trace of discipline that binds the clerical estate even to some degree, should be dismantled altogether? And what, then, does the church do? What tyranny does she practice against those who cannot with free conviction make the content of the symbols the content of their own faith? She says to them: You cannot be a teacher with me! — and she says it as gently as possible, and in application stretches the limits as far as ever possible; indeed, she (in Germany) still grants pensions to clergy who have resigned, in order to protect them personally from want. But no! Even that she must not do either, otherwise she is reproached for shackling exegesis (the interpretation of Scripture) and I know not what else, because she permits herself to hold the opinion that not every pastor is precisely called to present his own notions to the congregation as gospel, and because as the standard for judging his teaching she takes, not his own private thoughts about himself, but the tested confessions of the fathers, proven many times over according to Scripture, which she acknowledges as her own.

But enough of this vexatious point of contention, over which it would truly at last be necessary for believers to come to agreement, and to free themselves of the fruitless sidelong glances toward what pleases the world — which, for all that, remains the world. The position which we assign to the symbols — as testimonies of the faith of our church, which we confess because it is drawn from Holy Scripture and agrees with it — does not conflict with the scriptural principle as the Protestant Church sets it forth (that Holy Scripture is the sole rule and standard of faith and life); and whoever wishes to maintain otherwise…

*) This is precisely the error of the so-called Evangelical (United) Church, that in it even the unbeliever and the false believer has a right to confess and preach his unbelief or false belief. — Ed.