The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1917, Page 44

Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

⤓ Download .txt · copy text

44 The Lutheran Pioneer.

better than sacrifice, so sure is it that loyalty to
God’s Word glorifies and honors God far more
than great ostentation and the building of great
cathedrals.

Luther and his coworkers, therefore, insisted,
over against all error, that the written Word of
God is the only standard of doctrine and life, the
only rule by which all teachers and their teachings
must be tried and judged. Just as the sun in the
heavens is the real regulator of time, so also the
Bible, which is God’s revealed Word, must be and
remain the one supreme and absolute .rule in all
spiritual things. And just as we must set our
clocks and watches by the sun if we want them
to measure time correctly, so also must we measure
all that we say and write in matters of faith and

life by the Bible if we want it to be correct.

Nothing else but the Bible, not eyen an angel from
heaven, can establish an article of faith. We must
get our Christian knowledge from the Bible and
from the Bible only. The Pope cannot make
articles of faith, neither can councils or synods do
so. Human reason can never be the fountain of
spiritual knowledge, neither can we base new doc-
trines on visions or other pretended revelations.

In full accordance with the above, Luther also
insisted, as did his fellow-laborers, that the Word
of God must be its own interpreter. The Seriptures
are the light and lamp to guide our footsteps, and
we need no other light for the purpose. We might
as well pretend to increase the light of the sun by
holding a candle up to him as to try and make the
Bible brighter by means of human reason, tradition,
or new revelations. One portion of Scripture may,
indeed, be made plainer to us by another portion of
Scripture, but in such a case the Bible would still
remain its own interpreter. As soon as one would
use an outside rule to explain the teachings pf the
Bible, just so soon you would have made it subject
to human authority. For this reason Luther always
insisted that it is of fundamental importance that
the Bible explain the Bible, and thus,God be the
sole interpreter of His Word and through this Word
our sole Guide to heaven and salyation.

When Luther published his Ninety-five Theses
at Wittenberg, he acknowledged the Scriptures as
the Word of his Lord and Master, to which absolute
and implicit obedience was due. When he at Worms
stood in the presence of Emperor Charles and the
highest dignitaries of the Church and State, neither
the power of imperial Rome nor the authority of
papal Rome could dazzle him; for with head up-

Jitted he declared: “Unless I 2m convinced by the

teaching of the Word of God, 1 cannot and will
not retract anything.” So also when Zwingli at
Marburg pleaded with him, and again and again
advocated the authority of reason over against Serip-
ture, Luther’s answer was: “It is written. The text
stands there too powerfully.” With Luther, God’s
written Word ruled supreme, for he realized that it
was by acknowledging its supremacy that all praise
and glory is given to God.

In thits accepting God’s Word as the only source
of spiritual knowledge, Luther learned one blessed
truth after the other, and every truth he learned
from the Bible helped to magnify God’s glory.
There was, first of all, the blessed truth that we are
That doctrine gives all glory to God. And what is
rue of this central doctrine of the Bible is true of
every other doctrine that the Reformers drew from
Scripture, from the doctrine o/ the Holy Trinity
o the doctrine of the Last Things. Whether we
ook up to the height or down to the depth of Bible-
truths, whether we measure their length or their
sreadth, in every ease they reveal to us God’s glory,
and prompt the believing child of God to sing:

Glory be to-the Father, and to the Son, and to
the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now,
and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

BE SA pander

0 we

The Reformation and Missions.

The roots of modern missious reach back to the
Reformation, and the plant that is to-day bringing
forth such abundant fruit is four hundred years
old. Martin Luther strikes the keynote of world-
wide missions when he says in his Gospel Postil:
“But now when Christ comes, He sends His
preachers out into all the world, and commands
them to go straight forward and preach everywhere
to all the heathen. And ‘all tie world’ does not
mean one or two parts of it, bul everywhere within
it where people may live and diwell.” But though
Luther and others by utterances like that above
sowed the seed of modern missions, and while this
seed germinated, too, its early growth was below
the surface, as is the case with all seed, and it
was only gradually that the plant began to show
on the surface. But it did show here and there,
as, for example, when Gustavus Vasa, King of
Sweden, sent a number of missionaries as early as
1559 to work.among the heathen Laplanders.

saved alone by God’s grace, threugh faith in Christ. °

—