# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 07 19_S199
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

a party of former Jews separated itself off, the so-called Ebionites, who, however, were regarded by the mass of believers not as great minds, but as rather muddled little people; these held concerning Jesus that he was not true God but only a man, and that he was not conceived of the Holy Spirit, nor united with God in any special way, although they declared him to be more glorious than all the prophets. — In the beginning of the fourth Christian century a clergyman in Alexandria, named Arius, caused an uproar by likewise denying that Christ was the eternal Son of God and of one substance with the Father; he declared him to be "a creature and a made thing," though one created by God before all other things. This Arius won a strong following, but not for long. — In the fifth century the Pelagians came forward with the claim that there is no innate corruption, no original sin; that the newborn are in the same condition as Adam before the fall; that there is by nature a certain holiness in the soul, which holds rule within it; that every man can therefore, by his natural powers, lead so good a life that God would deem him worthy of admission into heaven. —

"You see, dear evangelical people, how early already Friends-of-Light-style light flickered in the Church? And how, likewise, at the time of the Reformation, a good many similarly enlightened people came forward, who, in their high learning, said (the disparaging Luther puts it: they "blurted out wantonly") that Christ is not true God, who held that nature is made righteous by natural powers, to the shame of Christ's suffering and merit, who did not teach that one receives forgiveness of sin through faith, but through our own satisfaction, etc. — Indeed, soon after the Reformation, in the second half of the sixteenth century, there appeared in Poland (one would hardly think it: in muddy Poland) a well-washed little people who resemble our Friends of Light to a hair. These were the Socinians, or Unitarians. They abolished, above all things, the divine Trinity; there was, they said, only one person in the Godhead, the Holy Spirit was merely a power and working of God, and Christ a mere man. Then original sin also seemed to them an old, stale leaven, which one must sweep clean out. The doctrine of atonement, too, was entirely rejected by them: "by his death Christ has given us (only) a beautiful example of suffering." And finally they did not regard the sacraments as special divine means of grace; these were, they said, quite insignificant customs; whether one is baptized or not, whether one goes to the Lord's Supper or not, does not matter so very much.

Only on one point — how strange! — had these believers-by-reason not fully broken through to the full light of the Friends of Light. For while they taught that Christ was a mere creature, they nevertheless supposed that he had been created directly by God — without male generation — in Mary, something which the Ebionites, in a more properly enlightened way, had already known better. The Socinians were driven out of Poland and withdrew for the most part to Transylvania; there, it is said, such poor people still run about to this day.

You have now convinced yourselves, my readers, that the Friends-of-Light movement is by no means anything new within the Christian Church, that its much-vaunted progress looks extremely doubtful, and that one could just as well, or with even more justice, say: you Friends of Light have marched backward to the Socinians, to the Pelagians, to the Ebionites of sorry memory; you Friends of Light have gathered your wisdom out of the heresies which the Church of Christ cast out. The only new thing is that this wisdom, at least within our own evangelical Church, was never before so widespread and so defiant.

But now we must ask how the Friends of Light stand in relation to the Christian Church, and in particular to our own evangelical Church. To this we will and must give an open answer. They are no longer evangelical Christians. For however much they may call out and cry: "We, we have the true evangelical Christianity!" this is nonetheless a palpable and thoroughly crude untruth, and really a ridiculous claim — except that at such misery one can scarcely laugh. Every church must have a definite faith; it must know what it believes, and must also be able to tell others what it believes. How necessary this is, everyone sees who earnestly turns his thoughts to it. I do not even wish to speak of the fact that every civil government already has the right to ask a religious community wishing to reside in its land: what do you believe? what do you teach? — for such a community might well teach things dangerous to the state. I wish to speak only of this: it is precisely faith that distinguishes one church from other churches and religious communities generally. I am evangelical, and am not Roman Catholic, and am not Greek, and am no Quaker and no Anabaptist, and no Muslim, precisely because I confess not the faith of the Muslims, nor of the Anabaptists, nor of the Quakers, nor of the Greeks, nor of the Catholics, but the evangelical faith. This must indeed be a definite faith, which distinguishes me — and itself — from all those named and their beliefs. A church that had no definite faith, in which Catholic as well as evangelical doctrine, biblical truth and contradictory opinions of reason, Judaism and heathenism, all held equal validity — such a church would be a motley-patched harlequin, an absurdity.

This, thank and praise God, our Church is not; it has a conscious faith, and this it has expressed in its public confessional writings drawn from God's Word, and these confessional writings have held good from the beginning of our Church down to this century, and they hold good still today; for the Church has not yet abolished them, and it will not abolish them either today or tomorrow, for no one has yet been able to demonstrate that a single doctrine in them is contrary to Scripture. Our Church's doctrine is firmly founded upon the holy mountains of the divine testimonies. But how, then, do the Friends of Light stand with regard to these confessional writings? As decided opponents, who cry: "They are the product of a dark century; away, away with them!" But how, in fact, do they mean still to be members of a church whose publicly professed faith they consign to the graves and vaults of the sixteenth century? Our chief confession is, as is well known, the Augsburg Confession; this is the constitutional charter of our Church. But it is precisely against this that the Friends of Light have a particular grudge; and they can hardly do otherwise, for of the twenty-one articles of that confession which set forth its doctrine, they are able to subscribe to scarcely two or three. But how, then, do they mean still to belong to a church that bears the Augsburg Confession as its coat of arms?

Yet let us, beloved, come somewhat closer still. Our Church has set forth, in particular, two chief and fundamental principles which most strongly mark its distinctive character, its evangelical essence, to which it holds most firmly, and with which, so to speak, it means to live and die. The one of these propositions reads: "Holy Scripture is the sole source of faith" — the other: "We are justified before God by grace through faith in the merit of Christ." Now the Friends of Light come forward and say, as to (1): By no means! The Bible can no longer be the sole source of faith. It is a human book, like other books, and by no means inspired by God, and our learned critics have discovered that one no longer even knows the true authors of all the individual books, and that it contains a great number of errors and, in part, real absurdities, such as the castings-out of devils, the story of Balaam's speaking donkey, and the like. Indeed, the Bible can be for us neither the sole, nor indeed any, source of faith at all, for it is a very murky, muddy source. If it is carefully cleansed of impurity and clarified, there does indeed still remain a portion of what is true and good, in which reason joyfully recognizes its own pronouncements once again; but the actual source of truth, the actual ground of our faith, must be acknowledged "within ourselves," in our own reason. "It is downright dangerous," says a prince among the Friends of Light, "to wish to found salvation upon any authority outside ourselves" (pope or Bible). — And what, now, do they say to (2), to the proposition that we are justified before God by grace through faith in the merit of Christ? This proposition, clearly expressed in countless passages of Scripture (John 3:16, 18, 36; Acts 16:31; Romans 3:23–27; Romans 4:5; Galatians 2:16; 1 Peter 1:9, etc.), is repugnant to all their thinking and understanding; and here one sees quite clearly how