# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 07 19_S200
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

unbowed reason (in Luther's phrase) is an enemy of God and of his truth. The merit of Christ in the sense of the doctrine of Scripture and of the Church — that he fulfilled the Law for us and bore for us the punishment of sin — is to them something so incomprehensibly foolish and perverse that they do not know what face to make over it. And by faith, by mere faith, one is supposed to be able to gain this merit and thereby God's grace and heaven!! What a bed of laziness, they cry, for human beings whom God created for activity! (As though a living faith could be dead.) No, they are the people who work and labor, who want to earn and merit everything themselves (though, to be sure, if you look closely, with the mouth and not with the deed); they ground their peace, the comfort of the forgiveness of their few small weaknesses, and their glorious reception into the glory of heaven, upon their works, upon their "worthy" and "continually and increasingly pure and worthy life." (It is enough to make one go quite cold all over.) Thus the doctrine of the righteousness of faith, which filled the whole soul of Luther and of all our evangelical forefathers with comfort and peace and blessed hope, that very same doctrine fills them with disgust and loathing, with anger and rage, or at least with the mockery and scorn that bubbles up abundantly on many occasions. Well, let them mock, let them laugh, let them rage, let them scold — we only ask: if they overturn the two chief and fundamental propositions of our Church, how can they still rightly be called members of it?

Yet let us set aside altogether the churchly relationship, and hold only to this, that the Evangelicals do after all take their name from the Gospel. Do the Friends of Light, then, rightly call themselves after it? Can they truly say that they are confessors and reverers of the Gospel? Ah, this has already been answered! But we wish to demonstrate the matter yet more closely. Let us take up the Gospels themselves. Already the announcement of the birth of the Baptist and of Christ by the angel Gabriel is to them a fable. Then the rejoicing angels who appeared to the shepherds on that holy night, the wondrous star which drew the wise men from the East and guided them from Jerusalem to Bethlehem — all mere inventions! Consider the number of Old Testament prophecies which are cited in the Gospels as fulfilled in and with Christ — these are, in their opinion, merely prophecies applied to Jesus in the imagination of the disciples (or even of Christ himself); the Old Testament writers, they say, could neither have looked into so distant a future, nor would they have wished to foretell anything of it. And now, above all, the many, many miracles of the Lord, from the turning of water at Cana to the healing of Malchus in Gethsemane! One can scarcely open the Gospels without coming upon one or more miracles. But before them no miracle finds any favor; either, they think, it happened quite naturally, and only the superstitious disciples turned it into a miracle, or there is nothing at all to it — the disciples or later Christians simply invented this miracle-story outright, probably indeed with good intentions, that is, told their fellow men a pretty lie.

Indeed, they, the Friends of Light, turn into lies the greatest and holiest facts recounted in the Gospels, on which our entire Christian faith rests. The incarnation of the eternal Word, or Son of God (John 1:1, 14) — is nothing. The Father's attestation of Jesus as his beloved Son, there at the river Jordan and on the holy mountain (Matthew 3:17; 17:5) — is nothing. The death of Jesus on the cross, to which John testifies so solemnly (John 19:35) — is likewise nothing; for Jesus, they say, did not really die, but was only apparently dead. And so also the resurrection of Jesus from the dead (Luke 18:33), without which, as Paul says, our faith is in vain and we are still in our sins — this too is nothing; Jesus, they say, only awoke again out of a severe fainting-fit. And finally the Lord's ascension from the Mount of Olives into heaven, that he sat down at the right hand of the Father in majesty — this, in the end, is also nothing; either the whole story was invented, or Jesus went back down again on the other side of the mountain. — It goes hard with me even to write down such wicked opinions and utterances of the Friends of Light; but matters have now come to such a point that it must be done.

And if we now, saying nothing further, consider the sayings of Jesus himself, do they agree with all of these? Or are there not a hundred and yet a hundred more that they will not hear (John 6:60), that their ears cannot bear? How, then, do such sayings sound to them: "No one has ever seen God, except him who is from the Father — he has seen him"; "the Father loves the Son and shows him everything that he does"; "As the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he will"; "I give my life as a ransom for many"; "This is my blood, which is shed for you for the forgiveness of sins"; "He who believes and is baptized will be saved, but he who does not believe will be condemned"; "Unless someone is born again of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh"; "He who remains in me, and I in him, bears much fruit; without me you can do nothing"; "The enemy who sowed the weeds is the devil"; "The ruler of this world is coming, and he has nothing in me"; "All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me"; "The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son"; "The hour is coming when all who are in the graves will hear his voice and come forth" — etc., etc.? Such sayings sound to them very discordant, utterly false.

Dear readers! How much is left to the Friends of Light, then, of the Gospels, to which they could assent with an honest and whole heart? And the subsequent New Testament writings also, after all, contain gospel. But what an offense to them must Paul's letters be in particular, who untiringly and with all his might preaches the hated righteousness of faith! But now judge whether those who mutilate the Gospel so terribly, and who thrust away from themselves with reluctance precisely its plainest chief and core doctrines, may still call themselves by its name? Never. — They cannot be evangelical Christians, because in truth they have no gospel, no glad tidings of the world's redemption through the Son of God. Protestants they are — that we do not deny them — only not such as we are. They protest against the faith of the Church, against the authority of the divine Word, against every rule and standard of faith and life other than their own reason. We protest against every human ordinance in matters of religion, holding fast and true to the clear, all-sufficient, and unchangeable Word of God.

But, my dear readers! the Friends of Light are not only no longer evangelical Christians, they are no longer Christians at all. This already emerges plainly enough from what has been said; but we will demonstrate it yet more definitely. They reject not only the confessional writings peculiar to our Church, namely the Augsburg Confession, but also the confession common to all Christians from the beginning — evangelical, Catholic, and Greek alike — the Apostles' Creed (I believe in God the Father, etc., and in Jesus Christ, God's only-begotten Son, etc.), the brief content of which forms the lowest foundation of the Christian Church. This lowest foundation of the Church of God they wish to take away, and they let themselves dream that it will then still stand — indeed stand all the more firmly and gloriously, and be all the more salutary for their children for time and eternity! Could I imagine that they would succeed, that they would bring the majority over to their side, truly my heart would tremble. If someone, say, could pull out the foundation-stones of the Magdeburg Cathedral, and that, moreover, while the cathedral were filled with people, what a dreadful and calamitous collapse would follow! Yet let them go on digging at this venerable and holy foundation wall; they will get bloody fingers, but — they will not succeed. The Lord of the Church still lives, and his name is still: Refuge! But in renouncing the common faith of the whole of Christendom, they thereby also renounce the very name of Christian.

It is truly no slander when we assert that the Friends of Light can no longer call themselves after Christ. For they are not believers in Christ, but believers in reason. If they wish to speak of Jesus quite candidly and honestly, with themselves and with us, then they must, judging as leniently as possible,