# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1862_S345
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Literary Notices. 345

know faith either (I put it this way on purpose; strictly I should say: he
knows no faith either; but I know that with such people it often stands
quite differently in the heart than in the head); for the invisible church is
nothing other than the total number of those who have the life-giving
faith, or who through faith have been made alive, reconciled to God, and
made partakers of heavenly citizenship. If there are no such people on
earth, then indeed the invisible church is nothing — but then it is also
senseless to go on speaking of a saving faith at all. Where, then, should
such a faith be found? In empty, uninhabited steppes, perhaps? For as
soon as it takes up dwelling in human beings — even if there were only
two or three of them on the whole face of the earth — the invisible
church is at once present. The genuine Romanists know this very well;
that is why, together with the invisible church, they also reject saving
faith.

Concerning the doctrine of the Antichrist, the review says: Vorreiter's
second chief offense against evangelical conviction (which, to be sure, he
shares with the whole "conservative" party) concerns the Antichrist. A
doctrine "in which strict Lutheranism and Calvinism truly agree" is, as is
well known, that "of the Antichristendom of the Pope." No doctrine of
the Reformation era is more offensive to our "conservative" Protestants
than exactly this one. Why? That can easily be gathered from the
political tendencies of these people, and we shall come back to this more
specifically further below. In the hatred against this general Protestant
doctrine the whole unprotestant character of the "conservative" party is
mirrored. Sooner deny, with the hardened Jews, that Jesus is the Christ,
than affirm, with the Evangelicals and Reformed, that the Pope is the
Antichrist! — So they would cry out with one voice, if an inescapable
alternative demanded the one or the other of them. It is not as easy as
V. imagines to be done with Luther's understanding of the Antichrist.
It has often been attacked and rejected; but men have only been able to
put fanaticism and fantastic notions in its place. It is, to this day, the
only historical one; all the others are the offspring of crude superstition,
or the fog-images of a morbid apocalyptic dreaming, or, like Vorreiter's
own, the airy shapes of a tendentious party politics. Only Luther's
conception of the Antichrist arose from an unbiased consideration of the
history of the world and of the church; the others who came after him
owe their origin, for the most part, to hatred against the Reformation and
to the ecclesiastical and political blackening and ghost-seeing that sprang
from this hatred. Luther, too, did not grasp these conceptions out of thin
air, nor suck them out of his fingers; quite against his own will, he had
his nose pressed onto it, so to speak. Of this, V. himself gives him honest
testimony in many places, relating how Luther at first struggled with all
his might against the conviction — long since spread through all
Germany, indeed throughout the whole