# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1850 01 08_S150
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

...in the most single essence and nature of the one Godhead. How can this rhyme? How is it possible that the one, whole, perfect Godhead of the Son should thus be separated or divided, so that it is at the same time united with the humanity? And is at the same time the very same Godhead in Christ, together with the humanity, one Person, and not the Father or the Holy Spirit. Oh, how they will only then truly rave, reel, and rage, when they come to this point. There they will find something to interpret; as indeed I hear, that they already go forward boldly and heartily with Eutychianism and Nestorianism.*) For this I well thought, and have also said, that they would have to come to this point; the devil cannot rest where he plants one heresy — he must plant more, and no error remains alone. When a ring is broken in one place, it is no longer a ring; it no longer holds, and it keeps breaking further, etc.

And even though they boast greatly that they believe this article concerning the Person of Christ, and talk much about it, you should not believe it; they certainly lie in everything they say about this: "With their mouth they indeed say it (just as the devils in the Gospel also call the Lord the Son of God, Mark 5:7), but the heart is far from it," Matt. 15:8 — that is certain. Just as the Jews swore by the living God, but swore falsely nonetheless, says the prophet. The Turk, too, praises the name of God, but at death they find out who their god is. For it is certain that whoever does not rightly believe one article, or will not (after having been admonished and instructed), certainly believes none with true earnestness and faith. And whoever is so bold as to dare deny God, or brand a word as a lie, and does so willfully against and beyond having been admonished or instructed once or twice, he also dares — and certainly does — deny God in all his words and brand them as lies.

Therefore it holds, plainly and purely: everything believed, or nothing believed. The Holy Spirit will not be separated or divided, so that he should let one part be taught or believed as true and the other as false — except where there are weak ones who are ready to let themselves be instructed and do not stubbornly contradict. Otherwise, if it were to be granted that anyone might deny one article without harm, so long as he held all the others to be right (although at bottom this is impossible), then no heretic would ever be condemned, nor could there be any heretic on earth at all. For all heretics are of this kind: that at first they take up only a single article, but afterward all the others must follow, and all be denied together — just as a ring, once it gets a crack or a fissure, is no longer of any use at all, and where a bell cracks in one place, it no longer rings either, but is entirely unfit.

Let the examples teach you this. Arius took up this one single article, that Christ

*) Nestorianism is the error of Nestorius, who separated the Godhead and the humanity of Christ.

...but rather, misuse it.

was not God, but a creature; the other articles, all of them — and especially that God the Father is the one God, Creator of heaven and earth, that Christ died for our sin, that Baptism, the Sacrament, the Keys, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal life exist — he believed, indeed, even more devoutly (as his own words run) than true Christians believe: yet there stands Holy Scripture, testifying that he believed no article at all. For thus says St. John, 1 John 2:23: "Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either; whoever confesses the Son has the Father also," etc. Now since Arius does not have the Son and the Father, he also has no God, nor a Creator of heaven and earth — that is, it does not help him that with his mouth he names and highly praises God the Father as Creator of heaven and earth, even though there is no other God who is Creator of heaven and earth than the one Arius names with his lying mouth: he still does not have Him, this Arius, as his God, because he denies and blasphemes his one and only Son, Christ, saying that he is not God.

Thus Baptism is for him no longer Baptism, forgiveness of sins no longer a forgiveness of sins, the Sacrament no longer a Sacrament — that is, it no longer profits him, even though he had previously been rightly baptized and had received true forgiveness and the true Sacrament. Thus he has lost all the articles of the faith, because he denies the true God of the faith, Christ, and no article is of any use to him at all, nor can he believe any article with true earnestness, but must use them all together for his own damnation, just as the Second Commandment says: "You shall not misuse the name of your God," Exod. 20:7. There you hear that even the true, holy name of God does not help, but rather harms, those who do not rightly believe. This is also why the ancient Fathers disputed whether the baptism of the Arians was even true baptism. Thus one misfortune always comes out of another.

(To be concluded.)

Correspondence from Germany.

(Conclusion.)

To move from these matters, which concern our Bavarian territorial church in particular, to the movements in the Protestant churches of Germany in general: an extraordinary zeal has made itself known, especially in Prussia, to bring the various confessional churches closer to one another — indeed, where possible, into a mutual alliance. That nothing will come of the Union favored since 1817 and 1830 is something people are gradually coming to realize — although a fair little band still remains loyal to it, whether for shame's sake or for honor's — and so people would like to set the matter going a little better, no longer as "union" but as "confederation." You have without doubt already heard of these confederation ideas, as they were hatched in September of 1848 and '49 (chiefly by Stahl, Nitzsch, von Bethmann-Hollweg, and Wichern, director of the "Rough House" near Hamburg), and so I probably need not write much about it. The difference between this confederation and the earlier union (which, to be sure, has not yet been legally abolished in Prussia) consists briefly in this: that in the union one sought to bring the Lutheran and Reformed churches under one hat by means of church government and the liturgy, whereas in the confederation this is to be done through common works of love (not a few would gladly bring the Roman Catholic church in as well, and consistently it does belong in this cloverleaf). You can easily imagine that honest Lutherans take no part in these efforts at confederation. To be sure, the scolding over their exclusivity and harshness starts up anew — but what does that matter? Let those swimmers swim on the sugar-water of their saltless love, which embraces everything with tenderness, even the lie and the most persistent error; the time will yet come when they say the very same thing about their confederation that they now say with a shrug about the much-praised union — namely, that it simply does not work this way. Let us confidently hold fast alone to the one, pure truth: whoever still holds to it along with us, with him we need conclude neither a union nor a confederation, for we already are with him that which they seek and do not find, namely, one. — These are, on the whole, also the principles which the members of the conference held at Leipzig in August 1848 and September 1849 declared to be their own.

For the Lutheran church, too, was not idle in these times of movement; here too, as in the political and social sphere, like has found its way to like. You have probably already heard the main point about this conference as well — how they would gladly have realized the fine idea of one German Lutheran Church no longer cut apart by any territorial border, but how they nevertheless spoke out quite firmly against the Wittenberg confederation ideas, and so forth. From this you will likely also have gathered that, on the whole, little was accomplished by it. "Much ado about nothing" is the motto for all the movements of the last two years, both in the political sphere and in the ecclesiastical. In most respects things stand worse than two years ago. That is why the revolution cannot yet be over, and indeed it is not; the oppositions found in Germany must still collide with one another in quite a different way, and when that happens it will mean a hard struggle, for it concerns nothing less than "to be or not to be." How deep and significant these oppositions are has become clear from the completed stage of the German revolution — as I already indicated to you at the beginning of this letter. Socialism undermines the state; German Catholicism and the "Lichtfreunde" movement harbor the same design against the church. Yet the latter has so far, on the whole, made little