# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1859_S356
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

356 A Comparison of Luther with Arndt and August H. Francke in This Regard, etc.

precious promises given us; I blot out your sin. 2. God's oath. 3. God's covenant of grace. 4. Christ's death; because sin has been perfectly paid for through Christ's death, God is therefore also willing to forget sin. It stands three times in Scripture that God will never again remember sin. 5. Christ's eternal and everlasting priesthood, as intercessor. 6. That God has appointed repentance for sinners: you accept repentance in place of sin; therefore God causes repentance and forgiveness to be preached in all the world. By this Manasseh comforts himself, that God has appointed repentance for sinners. 7. The seals of the holy Gospel, which are beautiful sermons of grace and signs of the forgiveness of sins: the holy sacraments; the examples of the poor sinners Peter, Paul, David, and Manasseh."

On close comparison, Arndt appears especially comforting for the afflicted, and in particular for those in need of comfort, whereas Luther, through his preaching, leads every person, in every condition, straight into the fullness of the Gospel of the forgiveness of his sins.

It is different when we compare Luther with the Pietists, for example with A. H. Francke. His chief concern is not so much to make his hearers certain of the forgiveness of sins, as rather to take from them a false certainty; he shows not so much how easily a poor sinner, now that Christ has earned forgiveness, may obtain it, but rather how much it costs; not because it is so hard to bring oneself to faith, but because so many other things are necessary before a person may believe. To this end he exaggerates, in his Postil of 1724, in the sermon on the Gospel for the nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, first of all what had previously gone on within the man sick of the palsy, in particular that he had not believed he would find help. He therefore continues: "It is accordingly necessary that you constantly guard yourselves against such a disposition as is so quick and ready to comfort itself at once with the grace of God and the forgiveness of sins; since it will be far more blessed for you if you give the punishing office of the Holy Spirit fair room and space in your soul." At another place: "It is our great misfortune that from our childhood on we so easily and so quickly comfort ourselves with the thought that we are all children of God. Believe me, dear people, that is not so easily done; or if you will not believe it, you may find it out on your deathbed... There belongs to it a true labor of the soul, an earnest struggle, so that the person feels it, recognizes it, is convinced of it, that in his previous life of servitude to sin and in the natural, unregenerate condition in which he found himself, he was no child of God."

As true as all this is, rightly understood, it is nevertheless not Lutheran that the whole sermon should bear the character of proclaiming forgiveness not as a good already earned for the world, but rather seeking, above all else, to take from the hearers their faith in the forgiveness of their sins, and presenting it only as a ground of reassurance and a goal for those who have first wrestled it out with themselves.