# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 05 24_S170
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

and 3. a kind of superstitious work-mongering with their faith. For whatever value and substance they may still, in a somewhat more generous manner, allow to the holy Sacraments, this rests with them not solely and exclusively upon and in the words of institution of the almighty Son of God, but their faith itself first helps to make it into what it is.

Philip. I do not quite understand this last point; please make it clear to me with an example.

Martin. Now you see, Philip: take the holy Lord's Supper, for example — they assert quite openly, and so do the Methodists as well in Article 18 (following the 28th of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England), that only believers become spiritual partakers of the body and blood of Christ (that is, that their faith ascends to heaven while their mouth receives the signs of bread and wine, and unites itself up there with the exalted Christ); but whoever has no faith receives nothing but bread and wine. From this you now see clearly that among the Reformed in general, faith in Christ and his atoning death helps to make — indeed chiefly makes — the holy Sacrament of the Altar, and not the words of the almighty Lord Christ: "this is my body, this is my blood." But unbelief toward these words of the Lord, in their plain and straightforward sense, produces, as a just blinding from God, superstition regarding the miraculous power of their own faith.

This comes out much the same as if I claimed that the sun's body, dark in itself, receives its illuminating and warming radiance only through my eye, or that food receives its strengthening and nourishing power only through my stomach. But the sun and food have their nature and working through God's Word and ordinance, and my eye and stomach are only the human — though likewise divinely ordained — means of reception. If these two are healthy by God's grace, I shall see and digest rightly; if they are diseased through Adam's sin and my own, I shall see and digest poorly — of which, of course, the sun and the food are innocent.

It is much the same in spiritual things with faith, which is the human means of reception for the divine means of grace — the Gospel and the holy Sacraments, which enlighten and nourish us spiritually — for their blessed appropriation. But as to whether we see rightly and grow strong unto eternal life, whether these spiritual gifts of love from our God and Savior have in themselves the essence and the power to enlighten and nourish us spiritually — to that our faith contributes nothing, and our unbelief takes nothing away; rather, that rests essentially and exclusively in the words of institution, of the command, and of the promise of him through whom the Father also created heaven and earth. Therefore they retain their nature and working even where unbelieving hearers of the Word and receivers of the holy Sacraments are present; but to such, the preaching of Christ becomes a savor of death unto death and turns to their curse, and through unbelieving eating and drinking they eat and drink judgment upon themselves, in that they do not discern the body of the Lord (1 Corinthians 11:29).

But if, in the case of those sensible things, it would seem merely childish and foolish for me to claim that my eye helps the sun to shine, or my stomach helps food to nourish, then here, in these spiritual things, it must rightly seem to every unprejudiced person wicked and presumptuous for me to claim that my faith helps form the essence and working of the Gospel and the Sacrament; for through the will and Word of the Lord they are what they are, prior to, apart from, and above all human faith.

Moreover, in the case of the holy Lord's Supper, for the person of weak faith under spiritual trial — for whose comfort it is especially given — there could be nothing more comfortless than if his oppressed faith nevertheless had to swing itself up to Christ in heaven in order to partake of the blessing of the Sacrament.

How much more comforting and heart-strengthening it is, instead, to take the Lord at his word from heaven, and to receive him — in his mystery-filled omnipotence and love that stoops down to our weakness — humbly and in faith, in and under the bread and wine!

Philip. Now it is clear to me what you earlier called a superstitious work-mongering with faith; and as strange as that expression seemed to me at the time, I now see that you are right in it.

Through such an overestimation of faith and such an underestimation of the means of grace, it seems, the sound and proper standpoint of the Gospel in general can be obscured and diminished; for it lacks, as it were, only a single step before one regards faith as a thing in itself, and even holds it to be something meritorious for obtaining grace.

Martin. Bravo, Philip! I see you are making good progress in the sound knowledge of salvation; indeed, Luther's Small Catechism, even without the Large, is an excellent teacher, where the dear Word of God, inner experience, and the blessed cross are present. You are quite right that this misjudging and undervaluing of the holy Sacraments, in their proper place within the order of salvation, can very easily drive the Reformed, and with them the Methodists, into this refined Catholicism of ascribing to faith a cooperating merit toward conversion and salvation.

And hence it also comes that the prevailing manner of preaching and teaching among the Methodists has something unhealthy and defective about it: for they press so forcibly upon the feelings of repentance, and bring forward faith so excessively and in isolation, that over this God's own work and deed — namely the Law, the cause of repentance, and the Gospel, the cause of faith — comes to stand very much in the shadow.

And this seems to me one of the chief defects of their manner of preaching; for that they, by and large, diligently and zealously urge repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus, we will not, in keeping with the truth, deny them, and we place their sermons far above all unbelieving moralizing sermons and the gaudy tinsel of fine rhetoric. And yet it is and remains just as true:

1. that they do not expound diligently enough, nor paint carefully enough before the eyes, the divine reality of Law and Gospel — that is, God's holiness and righteousness in his Law, and God's grace and mercy in his Gospel, namely Christ, crucified through us and for us, there and here, according to history and doctrine; and that this manner of preaching alone, together with the right doctrine and administration of the holy Sacraments in their place, is able, under God's grace, to produce and preserve deeply, thoroughly, and lastingly the right and healthy state of repentance and faith.

2. that, for the sake of a quicker, though superficial, effect, they prefer to press with Law and Gospel one-sidedly upon the feelings of their hearers, in order to produce, as hastily as possible, visible pains of repentance and joys of faith. In doing so they forget the important word of Mark 4:28: "For the earth brings forth fruit of itself: first the blade, then the ear, after that the full grain in the ear." In contrast to this, they act like children who dig up again today what they sowed yesterday, in order to see whether and how far the seed has grown. Therefore their preachers doubtless already count many a thing as conversion where the seed had fallen only on stony ground and therefore sprang up quickly, because there was no deeper soil for firmer rooting — that is, where people receive the Word with joy, but fall away in time of trial. Indeed, it does not even take tribulation and persecution for the Word's sake to make them fall away; but since the main thing consists precisely in the stirring up of feelings, and clear and sound knowledge of salvation is to them a matter of little concern, it is no wonder at all that quite a few fall away from the Methodists and go over to sects that stir the feelings even more strongly. It is somewhat as when a person who looks more to the spiciness than to the nourishment of a food, and prefers the pleasure of the tongue to the healthy nourishment of the whole body, goes from salt to sharp pepper and ginger, or from weak whiskey to something stronger; for the dulled tongue always needs sharper stimulants from without in order to feel the same sensation.

3. that the Methodists, instead of the right doctrine and administration of the holy Sacraments as the means of grace and salvation ordained by the Lord Christ himself, have fallen upon various human and artificial means of stimulation and methods, of which John Wesley and Whitefield still knew nothing, and which they would in part scarcely approve. Moreover, these men did not need