# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 08 02_S207
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

...that they are able to convey to you (see page 26). And if only this were unclouded truth! But instead the shadows of error creep in everywhere. They have the correct doctrine of one God, and yet no correct knowledge of the divine being, because they have fallen into the Jewish and Turkish belief in only one person in the Godhead. This error you must share with them. They name for you the divine attributes much as we do, but tend, for example, to form for themselves and others a very false conception of God's holiness and righteousness and of his love. They obscure for you the divine holiness and righteousness; their God has ceased to be a consuming fire against sin and a zealous avenger of evil; they can no longer tolerate such a God, because they do not know the word of reconciliation. Divine love, however, thus becomes the disposition of a weak father who does not overly concern himself with the misbehavior and wickedness of his children, and reaches for the rod only when they set upon one another with knives, or want to set the house on fire. You hear of a divine providence that rules over the world, but no one shows you how you may find comfort in it; the way is disguised from you that leads to the father's and mother's bosom, in which the poor human child, amid all its often so grievous fates, lays its head at rest — for only through Christ do we have access with full confidence, only through him do we cry from the depths of our hearts: Abba, dear Father! You retain the moral commandments,*) the law — but what is it without the Gospel? If it is preached and received only lightly, as is generally the case over there, it leaves one dead; but if it is once preached more sharply and taken more seriously to heart, it produces only wrath (Rom. 4:15); it holds your transgressions before your eyes and condemns you, and because you learn nothing of a forgiveness of sins by grace for Christ's sake, it arouses in your heart bitterness against the lawgiver, and thus brings about the very opposite of the first of all duties and virtues, the love of God. — See how error clings everywhere to the remaining doctrine of the Friends of Light, or how it remains ineffective, or takes a distorted position. Add to this that these people, because they press on unceasingly, themselves give up again in three or seven years what they praise today as truth. Reckon further that they, apart from the thinly-held doctrines in which the majority of their spokesmen are for the present still agreed, find themselves in contradiction with one another on a good many important points — one holding this, another that (a third holding nothing at all) — for example, how far divine providence extends, whether only over the greater things or also over the lesser, over your little chickens in the coop — whether prayer can accomplish anything with the Ruler of the world, or whether fate continues on its unalterable course — whether God comes into contact with the human soul itself, or affects it only through external things, and so on, and so on. I now ask you: is that a true light? These sparse, weakened, broken, trembling rays, losing themselves in embattled clouds, in the night of the earth — can you call them a full, pure, lovely and comforting light illuminating the path of earth? Alas, where the word of God, in its unimpaired dignity and truth, where that Sun of Righteousness, under whose wings is salvation, no longer shines, there it is truly dim and dark and dreadful!

*) A luminary among the Friends of Light on the left has, to be sure, already attacked the moral commandments of Scripture (Matt. 5:38–41), proof of what rapid — all-demolishing — progress enlightenment is making.

Dear brothers! hear further: as Friends of Light you have no peace. And I ask you to pay particular heed to this, for I am speaking of the best of all goods. Everything else, however it may appear, cannot truly delight and refresh you without this; all riches, all honor and joy of this earth, without peace in the depth of the soul, are but an empty semblance, in the end even a heavy yoke. But it is with this that Christ divinely comforts his disciples over the want of earthly glories and over all the sufferings of this age: "Peace I leave with you!" And when the apostles wish to convey to their fellow Christians the most precious thing, indeed a fullness of every good, they say: "Grace be with you, and peace" — "God give you much grace and peace" —; thus all their letters begin. But now we can never arrive at peace — that is, at the certainty that one stands well with God, at the blessed rest in his love and faithfulness — without him "who made peace through his blood on the cross, through himself." For whatever the mouth may say and however one may deceive oneself, our conscience testifies to us, as does Scripture, that we are all sinful and condemnable before God; and so we cannot lift up our eyes with confidence to the holy God and righteous Judge of the world without faith in the Reconciler, who has blotted out our sin and opened to us access to grace. When we have been justified by faith, then we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. (Rom. 5:1.) But this Christ, who was crucified for us, this faith in the Lamb of God who bears the sin of the world, you must, as Friends of Light, cast away; the doctrine that Jesus is the atonement for our sin through the shedding of his blood is depicted to you as nonsense, as an abomination — thus you are judged, and have judged yourselves. I assert with complete certainty — and it must be said for the sake of the Friends of Light themselves, if they still wish to heed a serious pointer, and for the sake of all the souls whose access to the one source of comfort they wish to block — that not one of them tastes the peace of God. No one can taste it, or Scripture becomes a lie; but we may not let it become a lie. By nature we are all "under wrath" (Eph. 2:1), all fallen under divine punitive justice; "but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (John 1:17). They do not rely on him, but on themselves, on their worthy life, on their praiseworthy conduct; but no man's life is so worthy, and no man's conduct so praiseworthy, that he would not have to tremble before the face of the Thrice-Holy One. Where, then, is peace? In the imagination, perhaps, but not in the depth of the heart. And however diligent you might be in good works — "the conscience," say our fathers, "cannot come to rest and peace through works, but only through faith, when it concludes with certainty that for Christ's sake it has a gracious God." Then your heart has come to rest and peace, when it sings:

I have now found the foundation
that holds my anchor forever;
where else, but in Jesus' wounds?
There it lay before the world began,
the foundation that stands unmovable,
when earth and heaven perish.

O brothers! Make your anchor fast in this foundation, and do not, for the sake of the vain chatter of boastful lips, abandon the eternal foundation of salvation. Grant to your yearning soul the noblest of all goods, without which it is, for all outward happiness, ever poor and wretched; grant yourselves the peace of God which Christ bestows, which, however, no Friend of Light can give you, none can preach into your heart with all his pompous speeches. Paul rightly says that peace is higher than all reason (Phil. 4:7); but what is higher than reason, reason itself cannot supply; what exceeds its concepts is — by their own explanation of it — nothing for the "rational believers," and therefore the peace of God is nothing for them either.

Dear brothers! hear further: as Friends of Light you have no life. To be sure, I gladly grant that as such you can also lead an honorable walk of life before the world, for that man is capable of by natural powers, as Article XVIII of the Augsburg Confession states: "that man has some measure of free will, so as to live an outwardly honorable life," etc. But that is not yet true life. True life springs up as a new heavenly nature within man, and sanctifies from within his outward doing and refraining, so that it becomes pleasing to God. And this life arises only from faith in Christ, as Scripture teaches him — as the only-begotten Son of God given up for our sins. "He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life." (1 John 5:12.) Our true life consists in fellowship with God and in the childlike, joyful love of God, from which the love of neighbor then in turn flows. But this childlike, joyful love of God dwells only in the heart from which Christ has taken away