# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 04 18_S133
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Might confessional writings and other core Lutheran books not soon appear in felicitous translations into the English language? For however highly he values his German mother tongue, and however earnestly its cultivation and preservation lie close to his heart, he does not wish, out of fleshly attachment to it, to narrow the boundaries of his Church, which is so well suited to penetrate with blessing, and to transform through sanctification, all languages, peoples, national characters, constitutions, individuals, estates, ages, and sexes.

Furthermore, the "Lutheraner" has never said that the Lutheran Church is "the only one that saves," and that everywhere else are "devil's chapels." He knows well, and we with him, and we boast of this to God's praise and thanks, but also with fear and trembling, that we have the sole saving doctrine, the pure and full truth. Nevertheless, he has never denied that even in the Roman Church and among the enthusiasts many souls can be saved through fragments of the truth, as for example through the second article, when, as poor sinners, they cast themselves upon Christ alone, take comfort in his merit, and are preserved, through a special safekeeping of the Holy Spirit, from being penetrated to mortal danger by the soul-destroying false doctrines of their religious parties.

Yet as little as we are therefore inclined to exchange our pure gold, that is, our pure and complete doctrine, for any alloyed metal, that is, for truth mixed with error, just so much is it for us an object of holy astonishment and adoring wonder at the incomprehensible love and wisdom of God — indeed, we recognize in it the triumph of his marvelous governance and his glorious rule, when we see how he brings simple, sincere, and salvation-seeking souls happily through a mass of soul-murdering human ordinances and human inventions, by means of a few individual sayings of his holy Word, to faith in Christ and thereby to the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation, without particular harm. As therefore only those people are "devil's apostles" to the "Lutheraner" who, against correct instruction and against the recognized pure doctrine, not only inwardly hold fast to errors contrary to Scripture but also proclaim them outwardly, gathering around themselves seduced followers and tearing them away from the true Church: so likewise "devil's chapels" are to him only those places where this seductive work of the devil goes on, and where, through such false prophets, thieves, and murderers, the sheep of Christ are stolen from the Lord and thrown into the jaws of the hellish wolf.

No upright Lutheran therefore sins when, following the example of the holy Apostle (Gal. 1:8; 5:12), in holy earnestness and zeal for God's truth and the salvation of poor sinners, he pronounces the curse upon manifestly malicious, stubborn, and hardened false teachers, and holds no fellowship whatsoever with them (2 John 10-11).

Every upright Lutheran is, however, held and bound by the love of Christ, first of all to pray heartily and sincerely, together with the holy Church and in his own closet, for all the ignorant and the deceived; but as for individual ones among them whom God specially brings across his path, he is to instruct and admonish them with faithful love, patience, and diligence, to warn them, and, God willing, even with tears, to entreat them earnestly to tear themselves loose from the bonds of the seducer and return to the bosom of the rightly-believing Church. If they do not listen, after having been admonished once and again, then he too is to avoid them. Titus 3:10.

(To be continued.)

On the Reprinting of Individual Writings of Dr. M. Luther.
(From an address by Dr. and Prof. G. C. A. Harleß.)

As for the dissemination of Luther's individual writings, would that be a superfluous undertaking, or one foreign to the spirit of the Reformer? What an insightful man, who in an earlier time earned lasting merit for making our people acquainted with Luther's writings, said in this regard has not entirely ceased to be true even today. "For too long," says he, "Luther's writings belonged among those books that are praised more than they are read. Whoever still wished to gain some knowledge of Luther as writer and orator generally drew it only from scattered passages found in other books, or from collections of pithy sayings which, compared with the writings themselves, are only what a bouquet of flowers is to the garden itself or the green meadow."

And that it came about this way, and still often comes about this way today, cannot be attributed merely to indifference. To how many of the people are the great collections of Luther's writings simply inaccessible; how many are deterred by the thought of having to pick at random, out of works so extensive, what would suit them and their need; and how sparse, on the whole, are still the separate printings of individual writings — and precisely of those which we may call, above others, suited to the people and to the times.

For the opinion that we no longer need these writings for our people, because one has progressed much further in insight and knowledge and now stands on a higher level — this opinion I shall not need to correct, since that has long since been done before me. "A peculiar delusion" the aforementioned insightful man calls it, and continues: "The world has progressed and progresses in learning, not in godliness; in experience, not in virtue; in book-knowledge, not in knowledge of human nature. New seas have been discovered, but not new virtues; all manner of art has been perfected, but not the capacity of man raised. — The excellent of every kind is above all time; it does not fade, it does not vanish. — What one calls the correct explanation is good, but not the best. Depth of understanding profits the soul; whoever can lead it there is the true master."

Indeed, if we — and rightly so — regard the poets, orators, and historians of pre-Christian antiquity as imperishable models of artistic beauty for all time, then an imperishable significance, abiding for all generations, must all the more be found in the witnesses of that truth which is not of today and yesterday, but one and the same for all time. And this holds in the very measure that they were less the satellites and bondsmen of that shifting weather in the atmosphere of the age which we are accustomed to call the spirit of the age — mere gout-sufferers of the Zeitgeist. For all the men through whom, as through Luther, God accomplished great things in his Church, were, only in what has been forgotten and has vanished, organs of the consciousness of their own age; in what remains, they stood above their age, indeed against their age, as bearers and heralds of a truth against which the world is ever at strife. Enough of what, at Luther's time, arose quite directly out of the murkily agitated waves of the spirit of the age sought to nest itself beneath the banners of the Reformation and to sail under its flag: Erasmian worldly cleverness, as well as Schwenckfeldian over-spirituality; the sophistry of a shallow rationality, as well as the mysticism of those who were "mere spirit"; communistic peasant rebellion and Anabaptist movements, as well as the financial maneuvers of princes and nobles who secularized ecclesiastical goods for their own pockets — all these offspring of the spirit of the age snatched at the Reformer's train in order to clothe themselves with his authority; but like mud that clings to the soles, Luther shook all of it off with a stamp of his foot. Wherein Luther was great was, to the great majority of his contemporaries, by far a riddle or an abomination. Because he was something other than the incarnation of the consciousness of his own age, that is what grounds his significance for all time.

But even if we wish to emphasize what is timely in the dissemination of Luther's writings, we may do so with full right and justice. For has the struggle in which the age of the Reformation was engaged actually ceased for our time? Do the old world-historical antitheses no longer exist? Is not what we now experience — where something has indeed changed — merely a further development and elaboration of the manifold and intricately entangled contradictions which Luther's work already had to undergo in the Reformer's own lifetime? The types and models of almost all the entanglements of the present can be demonstrated, for one who knows how to draw lessons for the future from the history of the past, in the history of the Reformation, in Luther's writings. And Luther is, moreover, rich in predictions concerning the