# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1859_S268
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

268 Difference between the Lutheran and Reformed Church.

with respect to the person of Christ himself; the opposition between the two churches in this regard is well known. But it is not so, either, insofar as its meaning is misjudged and it becomes for us something transient or something that has passed away. It is true that, according to Reformed teaching, Christ is even now still the God-man, but only up above in heaven, not here below on earth; whoever wishes to have fellowship with him must raise himself spiritually to him — mankind on earth is thus, after his ascension (in the sense of the doctrine above), just as forsaken of God as before his birth; his incarnation is for them just as much a thing that has passed away as the appearing of the star that stood over Bethlehem at his birth. Thus the highest act of God becomes something temporally transient and vanishing, because its meaning in itself is not understood. In general, according to Calvinist teaching the chief weight falls on eternal election, not on the appearing of Christ. How different it is according to the depth of Lutheran teaching, according to which Christ, and God in Christ, is continually and everywhere present in the Word and Sacrament. Luther saw thoroughly to the bottom of the matter. He writes on 1 John 4:2f.: "The spirit of the Sacramentarians grossly denies that Christ has come in the flesh, when they say that the flesh of Christ profits nothing; likewise that the Spirit must do everything, that Baptism is nothing. Therefore he is not of God. Christ has come in the flesh, that he might be present with us in Baptism and in the Holy Supper. Now every Christian who goes so far as to teach that Christ does everything through the sacraments is of God; he gladly hears of Christ and gives thanks for it; for he understands that Christ is his own and has come in the flesh." Should this difference, then, really be so insignificant? Just as the one concerns the second chief article of the Christian faith, so the other concerns the third, that of the Holy Spirit.

According to Luther the Holy Spirit is only one, his speech only one; and indeed he is none other than the one who speaks to us in Scripture; the Spirit cannot be separated from the Word. It is different according to the Reformed Church. First the clear words of institution of the Holy Supper are stripped of their verbal sense according to the standard of reason; then Zwingli and Calvin each set up his own doctrine of the Supper. And is all that supposed to be taught by the one Holy Spirit? Or are we to recognize in it nothing but human opinions? Then human reason and opinion take the place of the Holy Spirit, as the Landgrave of Hesse already remarked against Oecolampadius: those of Wittenberg at least stand on a fixed text; you have nothing but glosses and interpretations. The church would thus stand on human opinion instead of on God's Word, that is, it would cease to be a church. Hardly was that how the Swiss meant it. Luther expresses himself strikingly about this many-tonguedness of the Holy Spirit in his tract "Short Confession Concerning the Holy Sacrament" of the year 1545, as follows:

"First they were straightway warned, at the very beginning, by the Holy Spirit, when