# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1850 01 08_S149
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

For the third time they were admonished through the terrible judgment of God, when Zwingli was so wretchedly slain, as the histories and their own letters testify, and with him nearly five hundred men, very fine people. Although they wished to interpret such an angry judgment straightway as a sign of grace, and to praise Zwingli as a saint who (just as all saints must suffer much) was also slain innocently. What does it help? — if God sends upon them still more plagues than He sent upon Pharaoh, since they are of such a mind as to want to make out of it nothing but holy suffering? just as the Jews now for fifteen hundred years have likewise interpreted their suffering and misfortune, and thereby harden themselves all the more, so that they are the more terribly admonished. But I, who am so certain that Zwingli (as his own last little book testifies) died in great and many sins and in blasphemy of God, cannot believe their interpretation.

Although I do wish, and would have wished, that God had dealt with him according to the saying of St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 5:5: "To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus"; and 1 Corinthians 11:32: "When we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world." Oh, how heartily glad I would be if it had gone with him according to these sayings! For his misfortune grieved me beyond measure, and still does. If suffering is to be called holy and to make one holy, there must first be innocence and a good, godly cause, as St. Augustine also says: Non poena, sed causa facit martyrem. Now they know full well that Zwingli, on account of his blasphemy against the Sacrament, had also, in a worldly sense, a bad cause, in that he acted presumptuously in laying siege against that other side. So that it is found all the more that he was judged according to this saying: "Qui acceperit gladium, gladio peribit," Matthew 26:52. Yes, so we must think and hold: let them interpret, say, and dress it up however they will; the histories and their own writings stand against themselves.

They also console themselves (I hear it said) with the fact that they write many books and do great labor for the Church and upon the Scripture. What does it help? — since they falsify and pervert God's Word and Sacrament, and will not listen? Whoever does not hear God, him He in turn does not hear; rather, his prayer is an abomination, Proverbs 28:9. The Jews, too, labor very much in the Scripture, now for fully fifteen hundred years. Indeed, what heretics have not labored far more, teaching and writing, than the Christians? The devil's martyrs (as one says) earn hell far more dearly than heaven is earned by the saints.

Now since so many and such great warnings and admonitions of God have simply been lost on them — for my writing, which went out seventeen years ago, I may with good conscience and strong faith also claim as a divine admonition, alongside the other two admonitions — so

*) Not the punishment, but the cause, makes the martyr.

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I am also not too lowly to be the one by whom they should let themselves be admonished, however highly they may boast, since I too am a servant of Christ, as much as they, if not more, and have also labored in His Church before them; I will not boast too highly; but I must let them go and avoid them, as the autokatakritoi, Titus 3:11, who knowingly and willfully wish to be condemned, and have no fellowship whatsoever with any of them, neither by letters, writings, words, nor works, as the Lord commands, Matthew 18:17 — be he called Schwenckfeld, Zwingli, or whatever he will; for I reckon them all as of one batch, as indeed they are, who will not believe that the Lord's bread in the Supper is His true, natural body, which the ungodly, or Judas, receives just as truly with the mouth as St. Peter and all the saints. Whoever (I say) will not believe this, let him leave me in peace with letters, writings, or words, and let him hope for no fellowship with me; nothing else will come of it.

Herewith you have, my good friend, my reason why I have not wanted to hear the slanderous mouth, Schwenckfeld, nor to answer him; this you may, if you should so desire, point out to those whom perhaps that Stenkefeld has stunk up and befouled against me. I (as I have said) am glad that such slanderous mouths defame me, and that they are so very angry with me; here is no one who cares about their wrath. If they dare to call the master of the house Beelzebub, should they not also slander his household? that is, if they dare to blaspheme our dear Lord Jesus Christ and give the lie to His words, "Take, eat, this is My body," etc., and to interpret and pervert His blessed, comforting Sacrament into a peasants' drinking-bout — what should the most arrogant of spirits not do to poor Luther?

In sum, they have been found out and refuted by me many times over, as manifest blasphemers and liars. First, when in the beginning they taught that there was nothing but mere bread and wine in the Supper. For this they reviled and slandered us as flesh-eaters, blood-drinkers, Thyestean feasters, Capernaites, calling our Lord the baked God, the bready God, the winey God, etc., as the books plainly testify forever. What Christian heart can or will believe that the Holy Spirit, and not rather the wretched devil, dwells and continues to dwell in them, seeing that they interpret the plain words of the Lord, "Take, eat, this is My body," out of their own presumption and wantonness, according to their own dream, to mean that He is spiritually and not bodily present? For we know very well: although the Lord Christ, through faith (as St. Paul teaches, Ephesians 3:17), "dwells in our heart," which is called a spiritual dwelling, yet He has not taken to Himself a spiritual body or blood, nor given a spiritual body or blood for us, as He says, Luke 24:39: "Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have,"* and yet He dwells spiritually in our hearts.

* Here Luther rejects, with the same earnestness, Calvin's teaching as well as Zwingli's.

Secondly, the sayings that they adduced, those speaking of the ascension and of the flesh that profits nothing, I have clearly demonstrated that they interpreted falsely and used in a perverted sense, and are thus caught in many gross lies, and to this day remain unrepentant, hardened, and stiff-necked in such open blasphemies and lies. So I would have to condemn myself, together with them, to the abyss of hell, were I to side with them, or have fellowship with them, or even to keep silent about it when I noticed or heard that they claimed or boasted of fellowship with me; let the devil and his mother do that, or keep silent about it — I will not.

I will stand, with the holy father Abraham and all Christians, on the saying, Romans 4:21: "What God has promised, He is able also to perform"; likewise Psalm 51:6: "That thou mightest be justified in thy words, when thou art judged" — and I will not first ask counsel of my own reason as to how it might rhyme or be possible that I should receive His body and blood with my mouth, and thereafter, as a judge over God, interpret His words according to my own opinion. No, I will not be a fanatic in this way; He has said it, there I let it rest; if He deceives me, then I am blessedly deceived. He has never once lied, nor can He lie. But the fanatics are open liars, found out both by me and by themselves; they must also go on lying forever, because they trust their own opinion more than the Word of God.

And whoever will not do this, and will not stand upon this or similar sayings, "what God says, that He can do"; likewise, "God cannot lie," etc. — to him I faithfully advise that he leave the Holy Scripture and the articles of the Christian faith in peace; for by his interpreting he devils himself more and more, the longer the more, and it were better for him to remain a damned heathen than to become a damned Christian.

O dear man! Whoever will not believe the article concerning the Lord's Supper, how will he ever believe the article of the humanity and divinity of Christ in one Person? And if it troubles you that you receive the body of Christ with your mouth when you eat the bread from the altar, likewise that you receive the blood of Christ with your mouth when you drink the wine in the Supper — then it must certainly trouble you far more (especially when your final hour comes) how the infinite and incomprehensible Godhead, which is and must be everywhere present in essence, could be bodily enclosed and comprehended in the humanity and in the body of the Virgin, as St. Paul says, Colossians 1:19: "In Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily."

And how is it possible that you should believe that the Son alone became man, not the Father, nor the Holy Spirit, since yet the three Persons are nothing other than the one God,