# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1863_S356
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...to the best.*) Whoever, on the other hand, wishes to become acquainted with the cloud of witnesses in blood who died expressly as Lutherans, we recommend the following altogether excellent work: "The Martyrs of the Evangelical Lutheran Church," by C. J. Hermann Fick. St. Louis, Mo., published by M. Niedner, 1854. 2 vols. in 8vo.

As for the predicate "mission church," which Mr. K. secondly gives to his Reformed Church, we willingly grant that the Reformed Church is ahead of the Lutheran Church in the pursuit of mission work. It is another question, however, whether this proves that the former surpasses the latter in zeal for the rescue of souls still sitting in darkness and the shadow of death. This question we must altogether deny. The riddle resolves itself simply by the fact that the Reformed states and powers had, in part, a greater maritime trade, and in part more overseas heathen provinces; apart from the fact that it is not missionary work among the heathen as such, but rather the spread of pure evangelical truth, that can be regarded as a sign of a truly living church fellowship. It is precisely this sign, however, that the Reformed Church lacks. Were zeal in missions in itself a mark of the true Church, then the Christ-hating Jews would once have had to be the true Church (Matt. 23:15), and the Papists, and among them especially the Jesuits, would still have to be so.

Mr. K. writes further:

"We are Reformed because we also recognize as an advantage that our Church has altogether disdained to name itself after a man, as, alas, has happened with the Lutheran Church, quite to the point of tedium, wholly contrary to God's Word, 1 Cor. 1:12-13."

*) A proof that true Lutherans, in their struggle against the Reformed, always make an essential distinction between the seducers and the seduced, between those who err willfully and those who err out of weakness, between the blasphemers of the truth and those open to instruction. It is well known what is said of this in the preface to our Book of Concord, for the correct understanding of the condemnations occurring therein. So too Luther writes: "We must indeed confess that the fanatics have the Scripture and God's Word in other articles; and whoever hears and believes it from them will be saved, although they themselves are unholy heretics and blasphemers of Christ." (Letter on Rebaptism. Walch's edition, XVII, 2675.) So too writes Jacob Heilbrunner, the well-known Lutheran collocutor at the colloquy held with the Jesuits at Regensburg and Neuburg; after having shown that the Reformed cannot claim our brotherhood of faith, he says: "Nor is anything said here of the hearers who err from simplicity or lack of better information, who perhaps believe better and more simply than their teachers hold in their hearts, and who, because they have fallen away from the papacy, suffer persecution — with whom we bear a Christian compassion. We pray to God for them; whom we also gladly acknowledge, since they are not obstinate, as our dear brethren, in the comforting hope that God will not impute their errors to them. For erring makes no one a heretic; rather, one becomes a heretic when he obstinately persists in error against one or more articles of the Christian faith, against instruction, warning, and admonition already given. Rather, one is speaking here of the teachers or advocates of the false doctrine, who seduce poor souls and blaspheme the truth of God's Word." (See Synopsis doctrinae Calvinianae, 1597, 4to, p. 140.)