# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1863_S289
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume IX.    October 1863.    No. 10.

Some Remarks on a New Apology of the Reformed Church.
(Continued.)

Mr. Licentiate Pastor Krummacher continues as follows:

"In the doctrine of the free grace, bound to no merit and to no antecedent worthiness of disposition, the Lutheran conception is likewise infected with a Roman Catholic Pelagianism, or at least Semipelagianism, in that it posits a capacity, on the part of the sinner who is dead in sins and trespasses, of meeting God halfway, whereas the Reformed doctrine protests this in the most decided manner, since it ascribes even the faintest breath of a genuine longing after God and his grace solely to the grace that elects from eternity and before the foundation of the world, and that calls in time, and lets the ninth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans say what it says, without weakening and disfiguring it through all manner of exegetical artifices and interpolations — as the writer of these lines is living conviction that he has proven for every unprejudiced reader, in his book on the doctrine of the election of grace and the exposition, contained therein, of the 9th, 10th, and 11th chapters of the Epistle to the Romans. The Lutheran church has in this respect departed entirely from the doctrine of Luther in his book de servo arbitrio; it ignores this book, which Luther himself, even in his late years, acknowledged as his best little book, and there are very few Lutherans who have read it carefully. Our precious Reformed church gives free grace its full, undiminished honor, and does not shrink back from any consequences by which one imagines to reduce it to absurdity, no more than is the case with the Apostle Paul in Romans 9:19–21. Leaving man nothing but sin, impotence, guilt, and curse, it gives to the grace that is free of all merit and all worthiness, that abstracts from all being, ability, and having, and that works the faintest longing and presentiment, the sole and full honor."

Marginal remarks: If Mr. K. hereupon charges the Evangelical Lutheran church with a "Roman Catholic Pelagianism or at least Semipelagianism," we are far from wishing to absolve of this damnable heresy all those who have ever called themselves, and still call themselves, Lutherans and Lutheran theologians. It is