# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 07 05_S192
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Methodism. To this belongs, for example, J. Wesley's skewed view of evangelical sanctification, as though its completion into holiness were possible in this life, and then also his missionary wandering about even within existing fields of office, contrary to Paul's rule in Romans 15:20. For despite every evangelical appearance before the eyes and ears of the inexperienced, they nevertheless unfortunately stand, as we have sufficiently seen, with one foot in the Law and its works, and are rightly called Methodists — that is, people who imagine that a particular method, that is, a manner or way, consisting in these or those feelings, exercises, and institutions, cooperates for and in conversion and justification.

But through this subtle and quiet setting-up of man's work, inwardly and outwardly, God's work — that is, the grace of the Father, the merit of the Son, and the means of grace of the Holy Spirit — is undeniably, despite every appearance to the contrary, partly obscured; and hence it comes about that for them the chief and fundamental article on the appropriation of the grace of God — namely, that of justification, that is, the declaring righteous of the sinner out of the free grace of God through the merit of Jesus Christ, laid hold of by faith, without any inward or outward human accompanying or auxiliary work — remains a still half-closed mystery. Hence it further comes about that not a few so pitiably confuse "having forgiveness of sin" with "having no more sin," and that many a bench-penitent imagines himself to be a fairly finished saint, before he has, in deed and truth, become the true poor sinner in Adam and the righteous one in Christ.

Philipp. But what good does our better knowledge and doctrine do us, as our church's confessional writings testify to it, and as it is also confessed and taught by rightly-believing Lutheran preachers? Meanwhile the Methodists, especially in abandoned districts, keep drawing one inexperienced Lutheran after another to themselves. Does not the Methodist elder, Mr. P. Schmucker, boast in the Apologete that in the course of the year 1844 eight to ten German Methodist churches were built in the United States?

Martin. This is indeed heart-grieving, and should thoroughly lead me and you, and all who are of a faithful mind, to repentance, and move us to earnest supplication to the Lord that he send, ever more, from the bosom of our church, faithful laborers into his harvest. To be sure, I am not so fanatical as to hold that an unbelieving Lutheran is better off than a believing Methodist; but if the former, through God's grace and by means of the ministry of a faithful Lutheran preacher and shepherd, can attain to the sound, inwardly and vitally experienced faith of the church, then he is far better off than if he acquires only the legalistic, feeling-based faith of the Methodists; for, as we

have seen at length, this latter faith stands, after all, with one foot on sand, that is, on the work of man, and for that very reason cannot bestow firm peace on the poor heart. May, however, that sad fact of the spreading of Methodism among our German fellow believers here become a serious voice of warning and awakening for our mother church in Germany, that she may vigorously bestir herself to gather and care for, in motherly fashion, her orphaned and straying children here, so that they do not wither spiritually and fall prey to any sort of fanatical and fickle spirits. Long enough has she been negligent and remiss in this home mission, in the work of love; and it seems to me just as important, if not more so, that Lutheran Christians should not become fanatics or heathen, as that heathen should become Lutheran Christians. Or what mother would not first give bread to her own children before providing for those of strangers? Which mother, in looking out for new children, would neglect and abandon the ones already born to her? And although we are indeed to do good to everyone, still it is written: "but especially to those who are of the household of faith." Indeed, does not the apostle call it a denial of the faith if one does not provide for one's own household? Certainly the messengers from our dear homeland must not merely be believing workers cut from a pietistic, unionistic pattern — for of such feeling-believing little people, even in the German tongue, there is scarcely any lack here — but they must be churchly minded and churchly educated servants, skilled in teaching and defense, sober and level-headed, and yet at the same time zealous and self-denying, who, unanimously and in one accord with the faith and confession of the German mother church, gather and care for their scattered and orphaned children here, as is right, with Word and Sacrament — and not handle them in a Methodist or so-called Neo-Lutheran manner. For example, each one of them would have to take on only one, or at most two, nearby and still decidedly German congregations, and in any case take on the school himself, thoroughly and earnestly; for only in this way can our church and language be kept pure also in the coming generation.

Philipp. Who, then, actually are the so-called Neo-Lutherans, whose manner you just mentioned?

Martin. In essence and in truth they do not belong to the Lutheran church at all, and are a mishmash of Reformed doctrine and Methodist practice; for they — certainly not out of sheer ignorance on the part of their leaders and spokesmen — have now freely, out of brotherly love, given the Reformed the golden vessels of honor of the old evangelical-apostolic church, which their fathers cleansed of Roman-papist filth and then wrested from the hands of the fanatics, preserved, and bequeathed to their sons — and have begged for themselves, in return, the Reformed's brass vessels. These they then, in a new brotherly love — for they have a broad heart and conscience — handed over to the Methodists, and begged for themselves some of the latter's abundance of spiced mulled wine, in order to inflame their congregations more quickly with it, and perhaps also to soothe and numb thereby their own wobbly and unsteady conscience, which, given their twofold hatred of and breach of faith with their church, could hardly have been altogether so quiet.

Or, without the figure: they have, to name here the most essential point, abandoned the Lutheran — that is, the pure and churchly — doctrine of the holy sacraments, especially of the holy Lord's Supper, and adopted in its place the Reformed — that is, the fanatical, false — doctrine of it, partly out of the unbelief native to the old carnal reason, and partly perhaps out of brotherly love for the various Reformed English churches here, so that "the American Lutheran church" would not appear among them as altogether too old-fashioned and tainted with the semblance of the Roman-papist church. The gap that thereby arose they then sought to fill — as superstition usually stops up the holes of unbelief — by adopting Methodist artificial and coercive means, and have thus, from Lutheran, that is, rightly-believing minded, Christians, become fanatics of both head and heart at once.

Now, as far as I am concerned, they may have their pleasure and preference in this, if they think they can stand before the judgment seat of Christ with their loose and frivolous character; but in doing so they make themselves guilty of a twofold falsehood and impurity. The first consists in the fact that, in this breach of faith and apostasy, they call themselves the American Lutheran Church (see the Luth. Observer, vol. 11, no. 43, and see "Position of the American Lutheran Church" by Mr. W. M. R.), although they themselves surely know that up to now several Lutheran synods still do not share their apostate disposition — though they seek to lure these with smooth and sweet words, for example about the "admired liturgy"; the other consists in the fact that they call themselves the American Lutheran Church. Now it is almost impossible to assume in their spokesmen so excessive an ignorance that they would not know how this contempt of theirs for the sacraments is a decided cutting-off from the trunk of the Lutheran church, whose unity is, after all, to be sought and found nowhere else than in its own and universally valid confessional and doctrinal writings; for these set forth the sound scriptural understanding of the doctrine of salvation of the evangelical-apostolic church, in its development, thoroughly and in detail.

Whoever now reads this writing with a pure and sincere sense of truth, especially in view of the confused tangle of sects here, which more or less stems from contempt for the holy sacraments, will surely come to realize that it is no child's play whether one is minded, in this matter, in a Lutheran, that is, rightly-believing, way, or in a fanatical way. For what is at stake here is not a little leaven — though even that ought not to be tolerated in doctrine — but rather half of the truth for the appropriation of salvation is, through the hollowers-out and falsifiers of the holy sacraments, unto Christendom