# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 07 19_S198
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

revelation of God himself, indeed wills to bring forth out of itself all the eternal, divine truth that man needs unto salvation, then it has indeed become haughty, arrogant, dreadfully presumptuous — indeed an enemy of God.

Our great Reformer Luther views the matter in just the same way. He says: "Reason is a very great and inestimable gift of God, and what it wisely orders and devises in human affairs is not to be despised. It can found kingdoms and republics, preserve and secure them with useful laws, and keep and govern them in order through good counsel and wholesome commandments, etc." (Commentary on the 9th Chapter of Isaiah.) Further: "When reason is enlightened (by the Holy Spirit through Scripture), it takes all its thoughts from God's Word; according to that Word it directs and guides them also" — that is, all its thoughts, its view of human life, its judgment concerning scoffers, etc. (Table Talk.) But this same Luther also says of natural reason: "How can one call it good in higher and spiritual matters, since it is entirely without the knowledge of God and has turned quite away from God's will? Now this too is known: when one teaches the knowledge of God and undertakes to have reason set right again, it turns out that those who wish to be of the best reason and will (so to call it) are the most bitter enemies of the Gospel. Therefore we must say in theology that reason in man is against God, and is God's very worst enemy" (that is, by nature). [Commentary on the First Book of Moses.]

I cannot refrain from citing here yet another passage from Luther's Church Postil (sermon on the epistle for the first Sunday after Trinity), because it is so weighty, and speaks exactly as though for our Friends of Light: "Is this not blindness upon blindness, that a man who cannot (fully) describe the least work that he daily sees on his own body still ventures to know that which is beyond and above all reason, and dares so wantonly to blurt out and say: Christ is not true God? Therefore we must speak of such things (or even afterward only stammer) just as Holy Scripture tells us — that Jesus Christ is truly God! Thank God, I have the grace not to desire to dispute much about this, but when I know that it is God's Word, and that God has thus spoken, I ask no further how it can be true, and content myself with the Word of God alone, whether it rhymes with reason or not. So should every Christian also do in all the articles of our holy faith: that one does not quibble and dispute much over whether it is even possible, but looks and asks only whether it is God's Word. If it is his Word, that he has said it, then rely on it for certain; he will not lie, nor deceive you, even though you do not understand how or when!"

If the Friends of Light wish to be honest, they must confess that Luther is not their man, and they may offer him no more homage. For while on the one hand he did indeed free us from the papal yoke, on the other hand, in their view, he led us still much deeper into error. For those among them versed in history must admit that Luther made the natural corruption of man, both as regards understanding and will, far greater than his opponents in the papal church did, and that he placed everything — the comfort of life and of death — upon Christ's blood and righteousness, which we grasp in faith, whereas the papists, like the Friends of Light, let man become blessed through his own merit, through his own doing. But Luther too — you may believe this — if he could look down from his blessed height upon the earthly bustle, would take poor pleasure in the Friends of Light and all their homage, and his heart would be filled with the deepest sorrow at the sight of this great falling away from the Gospel, if the heart up there were still open to pain. Incidentally, Luther foresaw this misery; in his last sermon, which he preached at Wittenberg, he said in a prophetic spirit: "The devil will kindle the light of reason, and lead you away from the faith." Well, this is now fulfilled among a great multitude, and that is precisely what is called the mighty progress of our age.

My dear evangelical people! let us take a somewhat closer look at this mighty progress. Thousands flatter themselves and boast of themselves that they are far ahead of the ancients (their forefathers)! and because it is a fine thing to be far ahead, they keep on crying: "Forward! Forward! for heaven's sake, only not backward!" Were they not speaking of religion, one could still let this pass. It is undeniable that in various worldly arts and sciences people have come very far and have made discoveries and inventions that their forefathers could not have dreamed of. How amazed an old Roman, or even a German of the seventeenth century, would be if he suddenly saw a railway train, with the monster of the locomotive in front and with hundreds of passengers comfortably seated within, come rushing past him! The worldly arts and sciences are also the field in which the human spirit can always press further, perfect what has already been achieved, and bring to light new and unheard-of things. Here then, go bravely forward, you children of men! you will be praised for it. But, beloved! high above all the things of this age, high above all human art and knowledge, stands an eternal, unchangeable wisdom: that is the wisdom which deals with divine things, that is religion, which God has revealed to us from above. Once it has been completed in Christ Jesus, it can receive no increase of new truths, least of all such truths as would make the previous ones into lies. "Jesus Christ, yesterday and today, and the same also forever." The individual person is to receive the divine revelation into himself through learning and practice; the individual person is to draw out for himself ever more from the treasures of wisdom and knowledge; the individual person can and should grow in the understanding of all the spiritual, divine things that the Bible offers him. But what was truth in the time of the apostles is exactly the same truth today, and what was truth in Luther's time is exactly the same today, and there is no other and better gospel than what the apostles taught, and no other and better gospel than what our Reformer preached according to their writings. Here we must always go backward — that is, always back again to the old and ever freshly-flowing source of divine revelation in Scripture.

And what, in fact, is there really to this progress of the Friends of Light, these breathless forward-marchers? Have they actually advanced things further in even a single respect? Have they drawn even a single religious truth, hitherto undiscovered, up out of the gold-mine of their reason? If they can show even one single doctrinal proposition of religious truth, actually saying something, that did not exist before them, that our Church has not already long possessed, which they have only won for themselves in the course of their Enlightenment, then I will take off my hat to their Enlightenment; indeed, I stretch out my hand to them and say: in that case I myself will become a Friend of Light. But here, as already indicated above, they get stuck. Their art consists not at all in bringing forth anything new and more precious and thereby making mankind happy, but rather in clearing away what already exists, what for centuries has dispensed comfort and life and blessing. Their whole art, closely considered, consists in this: that they deny, and simply keep on denying. "This is nothing, and that is also nothing, and this again is nothing." Thus they attack one church doctrine after another and throw it out of the temple. They are forever clearing out; but they bring nothing in to replace it. Therefore a clever man has not inaptly said that the religion of the Friends of Light is as light as the farmer's barn at Pentecost time.

And even their contesting and denying of biblical doctrines and Christian fundamental truths is nothing entirely new. Hear this, my evangelical people! it is in every respect a gross untruth when it is claimed that the Friends-of-Light movement has only now grown up out of the cleverer, more reflective minds of the modern age, that it is a blossom of the higher culture of our day. Alas, this wisdom has long since existed! This I will now show you, and you may rely on the complete correctness of what I am about to tell you from church history.

Already right at the beginning of the Christian Church