# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1862_S283
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Literary Notices. 283

not at all a matter of indifference what one believes and confesses. Christianity, at least, is far from putting itself on a level with all the phantasms of human wisdom and folly, with all the spawn of lying, of the abyss, and of hell. It raises the proud, yet altogether just and thoroughly well-founded, claim to be the one true religion, the truth pure and simple, and the way to salvation. Outside of Christ there is no salvation! What meaning would passages like Acts 4:12, John 3:18, 1 Corinthians 3:11, Galatians 1:6-9 otherwise have? Would it be culpable arrogance when St. John writes in his first epistle (5:19): We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies in wickedness? Or Paul (Phil. 2:14-15): Do all things without murmuring and without doubting, that you may be blameless and pure, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world?

No, the Gospel is the enemy of all skepticism, of all wavering and vacillating in matters of salvation. Christian faith is a having and possessing of the truth, and not merely a restless and peaceless striving after it. The Gospel gives not merely riddles and problems, opinions and views, but sure conviction and a knowledge exalted above all doubt. The Holy Spirit guides into all truth, and where He is, He makes the heart certain, secure, confident, joyful in faith. To be sure, Scripture rejects all conceit of knowledge (1 Cor. 8:2); it declares that we walk by faith and not by sight, and that all our knowledge and prophecy here in this life is and remains fragmentary — the perfect is the object of our hoping and longing (1 Cor. 13:9) — nor does it want a lazy resting on knowledge already gained, but a constant growing in knowledge (2 Pet. 3:18; Col. 1:11; Eph. 1:17-19; 1 Cor. 16:13; 15:58) and an ever more living, more certain, clearer, and more complete grasp of the truth; but it also pronounces judgment on those who are ever learning and never come to the knowledge of the truth (2 Tim. 3:7); who, like children, let themselves be tossed and carried about by every wind of doctrine, through the trickery of men and deceit (Eph. 4:14); who can rise neither to a hearty Yes nor to a decided No of faith and confession, and who begin the sacred fabric of their faith today only to unravel it again tomorrow. Let those roll this Sisyphean stone of doubt who desire nothing better! Does it not say (Ps. 116:10; 2 Cor. 4:13; 2 Tim. 1:12; Rom. 8:37-39): I believe, therefore I speak? Should not our faith prove itself in the fire of temptation (1 Pet. 1:7; Rev. 3:18)? Must we not be ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of faith (Matt. 10:37-39; Luke 14:26; 9:25)? Shall we not one day have to appear before God with our faith, to stand before Him (Rom. 14:12; 1 Pet. 1:7)? In short, to believe while doubting is every bit as impossible as to pray while doubting (Heb. 11:1; John 1:6). By no means, then, can that freedom of faith which a Christian claims be this reckless freedom of unbelief and doubt just described. Faith rather begins everywhere at the point where one stops asking with Pilate: What is truth? and it is gone as soon as one passes out of the camp of sure conviction, confidence, and joyfulness into that of doubt, misgivings, open questions, and the like. And this divine joyfulness and certainty is found only in Christ and through God's Word. Error and falsehood cannot still the heart; they leave us eternally in doubt