# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1850 01 08_S76
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

to fulfill — indeed has already begun to do so. Therefore, however gloomy things may look here in many respects, and especially at certain times, for now it is only a matter of being still, faithfully doing one's own part, and waiting for the help of the Lord, our Lord, which will surely come, even when his word serves the old people only as a testimony, so that they will have no excuse at the last judgment. But you, dear reader, are kindly asked also to do your part faithfully, namely, to lift up heart and hands and remember before the throne of grace, in intercession, those who stand alone in a dark heathen world and have to wage war against the mighty and cunning enemies of the Lord. To be sure, the victory has long since been won, through our Lord Jesus Christ; but that this victory may also become ours, that the poor heathen too may become partakers of this victory of Christ — for that, pray, dear reader, with a fervent and believing spirit.

And with this let this overview be concluded; for of the two other bands that we still intend to visit, almost nothing at all can as yet be said; and of our new station, Sebewaing, report will be given by another hand.

On the Distress of the Prussian Church and Its Remedy.
Thoughts from one and another circular letter, sent in April 1847 by Dr. de Valenti.

Under this heading there is found, in the Journal for the Whole of Lutheran Theology and Church, edited by Dr. Rudelbach and Dr. Guericke, in the third quarterly issue of the year 1848, a more detailed communication, from which we take the following:

"These circular letters," de Valenti himself remarks, "were indeed sent last year (namely 1847), partly to a high official (Minister Eichhorn), partly elsewhere as well, without, however, being able to reach their actual destination." In them the author gives the King of Prussia and Minister Eichhorn, with regard to church and state, several earnest pieces of advice, whose observance he urgently recommends. "It is still," he says, "as I firmly believe, time to prevent unspeakable calamity, if one gives ear to the voice of truth, which is indeed often sharp and cutting at first." To the question of what calling he has to this step, the author answers: "It lies, on the one hand, in my unfeigned love for Prussia and its illustrious monarch, a love that often, and much, offers heartfelt prayers, both alone in the closet and in company with my faithful household congregation; on the other hand, also in my much-tested and well-founded conviction that the hints and counsels I have given still come early enough now to be able to prevent great, unspeakable harm and misfortune."

De Valenti himself states the actual purpose of his letter in these words: "I wish, namely, to bring about the conviction that even royal power itself, despite appearances to the contrary, is by no means called to carry out any essential reforms whatsoever in the Prussian territorial church, and that, in particular, the continuation and completion of the union already existing in name must bring about, not salvation, but unspeakable and incalculable misfortune for church and state."

The author first grounds this judgment by refuting the widespread assumption that a Bible-believing monarch, devoted in love to the crucified Savior and standing at the head of the most powerful German Protestant state, is already, as such, called to this work. He rebukes the sinful trust that a great number of short-sighted believers have placed in the pious King of Prussia; mentioning in this connection that he had heard from Privy Councillor Bunsen himself that since the days of David no king had ascended a throne like this one, and adds: "So this very sinful trust in a man who has yet to be proven in the fire of testing is to me a clear sign that the Lord will bring such false hope to shame in some way, both for the salvation of his church and for the salvation of those concerned and of us all. — Oh, that this might happen in such a way that these deluded people might be truly converted without severe judgments, or that at least the innocent might not themselves be drawn into the judgment of these dangerous pious flatterers for the sake of such shameful idolatry."

The reader knows how this prediction has been fulfilled. On March 18 of the year 1848, as is known, a terrible revolution broke out in Berlin, by which the Prussian state was shaken most violently, the king humbled most deeply, and the so-called union completely torn apart.

As a second ground for the above judgment, de Valenti names "above all the easily demonstrated fact that the ecclesiastical union now being pursued in Prussia is by no means to be regarded as a union of the Reformed and the Lutherans, but as a dangerous, spiritual plot (conspiracy) of degenerate and false Protestants. It is, namely, especially as far as its spokesmen are concerned, a merely external, voluptuously-ingeniously-sentimental and worldly-pleasure-seeking love-union of such degenerate pious people, who have retained no sound Reformed or Lutheran-Protestant vein whatsoever in doctrine and life. Indeed! the very principal members mediating the union on both sides are precisely such so-called believing theologians who have long since abandoned, in doctrine and life, the apostolic-Protestant standpoint common to both churches*), have allied themselves, more crudely or more subtly, in spiritual brotherhood with the crypto-(secretly) atheistic, and thus false, scholarship of a Hegel or a Schleiermacher, and in this way have betrayed the most sacred articles of faith and doctrine of both churches, in a heart-rending and faithless manner, to the antichristian spirit of the age. The proofs for this judgment lie in the writings accompanying the author's, which can shed the necessary light especially on Göschel, Nitzsch, and Schleiermacher. Although a Göschel, for example, is not so directly involved in the present union attempts as, say, a Dr. Nitzsch, he was nevertheless the spokesman of a great party among those who now wish to unite, on wholly extra-Protestant ground, to form a so-called united state church, and who have themselves been greeted even by a Hengstenberg and a Tholuck, despite the wealth of pantheistic, truly blasphemous folly to be found, for example, in Göschel's writings, as the harbingers of spring of believing scholarship. Such a union, however, is not a union between Reformed and Lutherans, which in fact and in truth, that is, in spirit and in faith, has long existed, but a betrayal committed against both churches, namely a recognition of the antichristian spirit of the age, which, if the plans of those pursuing the union succeed, advancing from one concession to another, must in the end infallibly bring about in Prussia the downfall of Protestantism (at least of the state-church kind), and with it, in the political sphere, an immeasurable calamity."

"Another, closer ground for the judgment named," de Valenti continues, "lies in the present spiritual standpoint of exalted persons." (Namely, of the King of Prussia.) "In order, in times as decisive as ours, to stand in any way as an inner,

*) Since de Valenti says of himself, on page 431, that he confesses himself "with his whole heart to the faith, the confession, and the ecclesiastical theology of the Lutheran Church," it is all the more striking that in these passages he speaks of an apostolic-Protestant standpoint common to both churches, and of a union between the Lutherans and the Reformed that has long existed, in fact and in truth, that is, in spirit and in faith. One might consider these statements justified by the fact that on page 433 he says that "the faith of a Luther has, in the Reformed Church, found ever more recognition of itself, especially since the last revival of faith." Yet in another place he speaks of an "already existing inner spiritual union of both churches, sufficiently proven also by history," and rebukes the late Scheibel for having acted unwisely in "tearing open the old church wounds again, instead of bearing witness against the monster, devastating to both churches, of the Göschel-Hegelian as well as the Nitzsch-Schleiermacherian fashionable gospel." From this it is clear that the author, otherwise dear to us, is plainly in error concerning the relationship of the Lutheran Church to the Reformed. The word that Luther held against the Reformed at Marburg — "You have a different spirit than we" — history has confirmed to this very day. Whereas Luther humbled himself in childlike fashion under the Word of God and took his reason captive under the obedience of faith, he thereby remained on the old "apostolic-Protestant standpoint," which the Reformed abandoned in that, in important articles of faith, they followed the conceit of their sinful reason.