# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1863_S302
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

302 Some Remarks on a New Apology of the Reformed Church.

...arbitrio "have read carefully," we can (as little as Mr. Kr.) neither decisively affirm nor deny, although we too suspect what Mr. Kr. asserts. And indeed every Lutheran preacher deserves at least a serious rebuke if he has neglected not merely to read that incomparable book, but truly to study it. That God is all in all and man is nothing, that God's word is light and human reason is darkness — this, according to Holy Scripture itself, is taught by hardly any book in the world more powerfully than that writing against the famous Humanist of Rotterdam. Would to God that Mr. Kr. had read this book with a "single eye"; then he would not have written "why we are not Lutheran, but Reformed," but rather why we are not Reformed, but Lutheran. Or, in his reading of that book, to mention only this one thing, did he not come upon that passage in it: "I say, then, that one should avoid and flee all twisted and figurative words (= tropes) like poison, and hold fast to the plain, clear words, where Scripture itself does not compel (as when the plain sense simply does not fit) certain sayings to be understood as a figurative expression. See only how it went with Origen, who in his exposition of Scripture everywhere made many twisted words (tropes) out of Scripture: what good occasion he gives Porphyry to attack everything, so that even Jerome, who nevertheless defends Origen, says it does little to the point. Likewise, how did it go with the Arians and their twisted word, who held Christ to be such that he was called God by name and was not God in essence, so that he would be God without Godhead, like a territorial prince without a territory? Likewise, how has it gone in our own time with the new prophets" (Carlstadt, Zwingli, etc.) "(with the words of Christ, Matt. 26:26: This is my body — where one wanted to make a twisted word (a trope) out of the little word 'this,' another out of the little word 'is,' the third out of the word 'body'? I have taken particular care to note that all heresies and errors in Scripture have not arisen from the plain words of Scripture or the Bible (although the sophists have spread throughout the whole world the proverb that the Bible is a heretics' book), but rather all error has come from this, that men have let go of the clear words and have concocted, out of their own brain, a special interpretation by way of contrived inferences and figurative words." (Luther's Works, Walch's Edition XVIII, 2272, 2273.) Mr. Kr. sees — it is dangerous when a Reformed man publicly complains that the Lutherans do not read Luther's writing De servo arbitrio carefully; for should they do so, then even the last hope that they will become Reformed is lost.

(To be concluded.)

— that is to say: all this comes about because God does not will that such men should be saved, but has predestined them from eternity to sin and damnation.) See Luther's Works, Walch's Edition XVIII, 2235, 2236, 2237.