# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 05 24_S180
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

—reason of the "Friends of Light" [Lichtfreunde]) receives its life-giving power and harmonious meaning, just as, in general, it is the church as a divine organ (or reason) that first lends it its authority to be a divine book. In these words the crass doctrine of the pseudo-church of Christ is set forth according to its basic outlines — a church that is no bride, but a harlot of the antichristian kingdom; from this all its other falsifications of the pure evangelical doctrine derive; to this, with necessary consequence, even the slightest beginning of the acceptance of a visible church must in the end lead, because thereby the gift of the Holy Spirit must always be bound mechanically to visible personalities and their official succession in general.*) This is the stronghold, the firm gates of hell, with which Lucifer defends his kingdom here on earth; and, full of anxious foreboding, yet also sensing the powerful pull of the truth of the prophetic Spirit, the Christian beholds how nearly the most learned theology of the church, now as before, has for the greater part drunk of the intoxicating cup of creature-worship, while speculative free-thinking is but the coarse reflection of the same and its dregs. Yet the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty before God to destroy the fortifications of the spirit of darkness under a heavenly angel's garb, to destroy the schemes and every height that exalts itself against the knowledge of God. We ask: Who is the rock on which Christ has built the

*) That Christ founded a visible church can mean nothing other than this: He gathered about Himself a company to whom He entrusted everything, gave the promise to be with them all the days until the end of the world, and promised them the Spirit who would guide them into all truth. Everything depended only on one's being within this visible fellowship; however it handed down the teaching of Jesus and interpreted the sense of the Holy Spirit within it, whatever it thereafter established, ordered, commanded — and this it did through its continuing apostolate or office, etc., etc. — was divine; for Christian truth and this visible manifestation were not to be separated from one another. Thus the salvation of mankind would have depended on men alone; but who could be certain that these men mixed nothing impure into it? It is entirely otherwise with the invisible church. This was built up inwardly through faith, and to faith alone was every promise given (and all the degrees of the heavenly hierarchy are conditioned by it). Whoever wishes to be saved and to be within the realm of the church — which here fights and there triumphs — must not seek her among human authorities nor wish to bind her to a time and a place, "behold, here is Christ and His body, or there" — for how could he ever find out who belongs to it, so as to be able to rely upon it? Rather, let him ask where the Word is confessed wholly undivided, the Word which gives faith into hearts as the sun gives its rays to the earth; it must be to him a word of divine grace, no matter from whom he hears it or receives it; only a canon of Scripture of that same Holy Spirit can lend it the seal of divine infallibility.

To be sure, the church of Christ reveals herself in the world, yet not she herself, properly speaking, but only the great number — within the church, so far as Word and Sacrament reach, under which she lies hidden — of more or less pure particular churches of the most varied degrees, with individual, self-contained confessions, some of which, under the governance of the divine Spirit, express by degrees, and to an ever clearer and deeper knowledge of the church as a whole through the contrasts encountered in the world, the faith once delivered to the saints and the position of doctrine over against the heresies that have arisen in the course of time (Ephesians 4:12f.; 1 Corinthians 13:9) — a throng in which the Word and Sacrament of the church, even when administered by wolves, are to be found as effects of her presence, without any special grace of ordination. In an improper sense a visible throng and a particular church can be called a true one when it has a pure administration of the means of grace, which is all that the concept of the visible can embrace. (The church, one body with Christ, that is, as a universal, whereby the difference of the accidental is negated, brings forth the threefold, its own substance, the individual believers. The fructifying seed is the Word.)

congregation? (For Peter was only a man of the rock, not the rock itself, otherwise the Lord would have had to name him Petra.) It is the invisible rock of salvation and of strength that stands forever, of which Scripture testifies so often; and all who have come to this living stone through faith, that apostle designates as a spiritual house to be built up, as a chosen generation and a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices (1 Peter 2:4ff.; John 6:29); and this supersensible temple, St. Paul adds, is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, joined together through the cornerstone, Christ, as the foundation stone, who laid Himself, and such a firm foundation of God bears this seal, that the Lord knows those who are His by the pledge of the Holy Spirit, which is given into their hearts, Ephesians 2:20 (2 Timothy 2:19), 1:13f. Where, then, does it stand in Scripture that a visible church has been promised the Holy Spirit? The church is to be spiritual, eternal; but everything visible is temporal (2 Corinthians 4:18). The church is to have no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but is to be holy and blameless through baptism, which imparts, in faith — a faith that truly cannot be seen — the merit of Christ; one body and one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, Ephesians 5:26ff., 4:4f. — but in the visible throng we see nothing but the weakness of the flesh, or factions. (How the church is at once wholly ideal and yet in the deepest sense real, lies beneath the veil of appearance and never falls under the senses, and yet erects her ideal edifice upon truth itself, upon the firm, deep ground of reality — that is what few grasp, and it is what makes so squint-eyed the views of many who place her behind or outside of appearance instead of in and with it. The mere world passes away with its lust; for it, the church that carries herself out within it has only the passing existence [contingency!] of a material to be consumed; but he who does the will of God abides forever, that is, possesses true life — the essence, not that which merely appears in it. In the use of the means of grace the church appears; her final end is to be filled with all the fullness of God, yet that which is perfect has not yet appeared, 1 John 3:2, 1 Corinthians 13:10, Ephesians 3:19, compare 21, 1:23 — for which reason our confessors guard themselves most explicitly against dreaming of any platonic republic [an idea absolute in every respect], Apology of the Augsburg Confession, p. 148, ed. Rechenberg.)*) Where does it stand written

*) The church, in her truth, can never here become visible, no more than the new man who reaches after the supersensible and feeds upon the Gospel; all the works of believers, which turn toward what is below, and by which the process of faith is completed in this world, James 2:22, are, so long as they are on earth, only manifestations of the inward faith, which itself is indeed not seen, but as its ground can again be known only through itself. The same faith which believes the church without works — in which it is not deceived, because God says so — is active in love, according to which it, thus with works, believes its neighbor concerning what he professes of himself, although here it can be very greatly deceived. The works of good Christians and of Christians of the Law can be entirely the same; a wild and a noble apple tree can look entirely and altogether alike; it is the inner constitution (the subject of their development, the principle of their realization) that so widely separates them; and this foundation, in the one born again, is the love of God poured — that is, believed — into his heart from above, toward him, the gift which he receives purely and solely (for God has no need of him, just as the full breasts of a mother have no need of her child), which, once it has entered into real relation to him and communicated itself to him, develops as a seed of the divine in man into a capacity to love God in return and to give back to God what is God's, namely His love, of whose true archetype he has become conscious through faith — and toward

that Christ laid the spoken word of the apostles as the foundation on which the church, together with Scripture, is built, since among "the prophets" only their written monuments can be understood (compare 2 Timothy 3:16)? To be sure, the preaching of the Gospel, sent out and confirmed by accompanying signs, throughout all the world, was the means by which the church gathered herself, and only afterward was she entrusted with the holy Scriptures; but these bear witness for themselves, or rather God does so in them, whose power the Gospel is, although we owe to the church (of the Old and New Testaments) her preservation and historical attestation — which in itself, however, gives no divine certainty. If the Word, which the church, as the power of universal consciousness over against the individual, according to the right of a human authority over personality, already speaks to us through the parents' mouth at the cradle, is to be known by us as unclouded, salvation-bringing truth, then a divine Scripture of the apostles and prophets, overcoming all doubt, must be present. Every tradition, the further it travels, becomes altered and distorted; a Scripture that documents itself, outwardly and inwardly, brings every falsification itself to light. How could Christ have made the salvation of the children of men, purchased with His own blood, dependent on the fidelity and faith of others, and not rather on their own conviction in conscience, arising from a written, firmly established word, in which the Holy Spirit speaks to us without ever-new mediating organs — on the testimony of the truth, of the Spirit, of eternal life, which we ourselves can draw at the source, where it is needed, given the fallibility of human teachers? Compare 1 John 5:5, 13; John 4:42; Acts 17:11. (The important example of the Bereans who searched the Scriptures.) — Moreover, all tradition, insofar as it has a content not given in Scripture, has long since been judged by the true church of God, from whom, as hidden under the papacy, we have received Scripture and the sum of the faith drawn from Scripture in some form of confession. So then, stand fast in the liberty with which Christ has set you free, and do not let yourselves be entangled again in the yoke of bondage. In vain do they serve me, says the Lord, while they teach such doctrine as is nothing but the commandments of men. Cursed is the faith that believes divine things as though they were human matters! Because you have kept the word of my patience — that alone counts — I also will keep you from the hour of trial that is to come upon the whole world, to try those who dwell upon the earth. Behold, I come quickly. Hold fast what you have, that no one may take your crown. When the props of earthly prosperity shall be shattered, when the joints of civil society shall be torn apart and the common order of things shall break and come to ruin, when the kingdoms of the world shall fall and the ornaments and splendid titles in states and churches shall become cheap, when faith and love shall rise in price and men shall languish for fear and for waiting for the things that are to come upon the earth — then the Spirit and, through Him, with head lifted up, the Bride, will say: Come! — Yes, come, Lord Jesus, Amen.

...to whose highest goal, the full-grown maturity of the fullness of Jesus Christ, His body, the whole church, moves through Him, where she will then be manifestly with Christ and like Him in His glory, when He shall deliver up His kingdom to the Father, unto the eternal beholding of God, transfigured as He is all in all. 1 John chapter 1, Ephesians 4:13 (original), 1 Corinthians 13:8ff., 15:24.