# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1851 04 01_S123
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

123

Christ: This is in itself a true creature, created together by the Father, Son and Holy Ghost; and it is not to be endured in the faith that the Father alone, or the Son alone, or the Holy Ghost alone, created this creature or humanity: but it is an Opus indivisum Trinitatis, a work which all three persons, as one only God and Creator, have created in one and the same work; as the angel Gabriel says to the virgin Mary, Luke 1, 35.: The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee. Not only is the Holy Ghost there over thee, (says he,) but also the Most High; that is, the Father will overshadow thee with his power, that is, through his Son or Word: so also that which is born in thee shall be called the Son of the Most High, so that the whole Trinity, as one only Creator, is here, and has created and made the one work, the humanity, and yet has united with it the person of the Son alone, who became man, not the Father, nor the Holy Ghost.

And of this man thou canst not say: That is God the Father: or: That is God the Holy Ghost; but must say: That is God the Son; although God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost is one only God: so that thou sayest quite rightly of the man: That is God, and there is no other God; yet sayest wrongly: That is God the Father, or God the Holy Ghost; but must say: That is God the Son; as St. Paul says, Col. 2, 9: For in Christ dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead, and yet the Father and the Holy Ghost are not thereby deprived of the same Godhead, but with the Son and man Christ are one only God. From this thou seest how the three divine persons are to be believed distinct, inwardly in the Godhead, and are not to be mingled into one person, and yet the divine one essence is not to be severed, or three gods made; but outwardly, toward the creature, there is one only Creator, so entirely one that even the creature, which takes the persons distinctly upon itself, is the one and the same work of all three persons as of one God.

"Now I perceive of a truth that God is no respecter of persons; but in every nation he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is accepted with him."
Acts 10, 31. 35.

This saying of the holy Apostle Peter the Unionists and Indifferentists, and in particular the open enemies of the Christian faith, have from of old held to be an iron wall, behind which they could fight securely and invincibly against all those who maintain that there is only One way to salvation, only One true religion and church, and that the only means of being saved is faith. They say: Do ye not hear what [illegible] Apostle himself says: "In every nation he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted with him?" Does not the Bible [illegible] confirm hereby that it is quite indifferent what faith and what religion a man has and to what church he confesses himself? Does not the Book itself declare hereby, which you Old-Lutherans hold so stiffly for God's Word: If a man only worships his God according to the degree of his knowledge, and does right according to his conscience, he is acceptable to God? Behold, God will one day not ask after what, but how a man has been; not after what he believed, but how he lived; not after whether he was a Christian, or a Jew, or a Mohammedan, or a heathen, not after whether he was a Lutheran, or a Reformed, or a Catholic or a freethinker, but — whether he was a good man. Thus it is said, for example, in the so-called "Stunden der Andacht" *): Every religion is venerable, for all religion is a path to God. Venerable to me even is the devotion of the heathen, when he casts himself down in worship before the rising sun or before the stars, as before deities. This unlearned one, he worships God only after his fashion; in his weakness he confounds the creature with the Creator. Not our opinion, not our weak knowledge, no, our deed shall be judged!"

*) This book, one must at least confess, bears a very fitting title, for it teaches, namely, a religion of devotional hours. For the esteemed author of this book knew well that the world also wishes to be devout in certain hours, if only it may live the rest of the time as it pleases.

According to this one should indeed suppose that the Indifferentists, freethinkers and enemies of religion must be very virtuous, loving, God-fearing, conscientious people. But wonderful! precisely these people, who always have "virtue, human dignity, noble works," etc. in their mouths, and say that man can be saved only by this, show anything but this. Truly, if it were as the unbelievers maintain, that one can be saved by good works alone, they ought in fairness to be so reasonable as to see that with this doctrine it would stand worse with no one than with them! unless they think that their gluttony and drunkenness, their cursing and raging, their dancing and gaming, their usury and cheating, their pride and haughtiness, mostly going to the point of the ridiculous, their spite and implacability among themselves, their lying and slandering, their whoring and rascality, in short, their either open life of shame or, at best, under the whitewash of a fine worldly culture, concealed life without fear of God, in vanity, self-interest and selfishness, these are the virtues, this is the "doing right" of which the Apostle Peter speaks in that passage, whereby man is acceptable to God and heaven is infallibly opened to him! — But, dear reader, why should we dwell long upon those who, in order to combat the Christian faith, exalt virtue so highly? That these poor men are not in earnest about their virtue-prating, that, if they were to speak out the ground of their heart, they would have to confess that they actually believe in no God at all, save in their belly, and in that with which they fill it and in which they clothe it, that can now be seen even by a blind man. The prating moralists have feigned long enough; to wear their mask is becoming ever more unbearable to them now that enlightenment has risen ever higher; thousands therefore begin even now to cast it away, and say it right out: the God in whom they actually believed and whom they worshipped, that is they themselves, and the heaven which they sought, that is none other than that which the other beasts upon earth also sought, namely eating and drinking and being merry, as, for example, a certain Mr. Franz Schmidt says without concealment in a periodical published here a few days ago, called "Freie Blätter" (to which we intend to return on another occasion).

According to this it seems indeed not necessary to prove to the enemies of the faith that the holy Apostle Peter, by that saying, means anything less than that nothing depends upon faith, but solely upon good works, for these people themselves do not believe, least of all the latter. There are, however, some who have heard from youth false, rationalistic doctrine and interpretation of Scripture, and who therefore, more from ignorance than from hardened malice, really are of the opinion that that apostolic saying plainly shows that, even according to the Bible, it is all one what religion one has, if one only leads an outwardly respectable walk before men.

To such we therefore turn and ask them: Should this really be the sense of those words of Peter? — If it were so, then the whole Bible and the special divine revelation contained therein would be superfluous; so also it would have been quite unnecessary that God became man, to make satisfaction himself for the sinful world, and so to receive the sinners who would believe in the atonement instituted, without prejudice to his righteousness, again into grace. If Peter wished to say by those words that a man can be saved even without faith, then the Bible would contradict itself, and so the whole Bible would be false. For what does it say in other places? There it is said already on the second leaf of it, in the 3rd chapter of the 1st Book of Moses, after the fall of the human race from God into sin is described there: the "seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head." Herewith it was at once proclaimed to the world that man cannot redeem himself and raise himself up again from his fall, but that One should come, who would do this, and in him the fallen man should hope, in him he should take comfort, who would help him. Nothing else than faith in the Redeemer, it is therefore, which was herewith already set before the first world as the one way to salvation. Let us now go further, to the time when all the world was sunk in idolatry, and had rejected the first revelation of God, and God therefore chose a man, through whom and whose descendants God would propagate his revelation of salvation to the world, down to Abraham — so we hear again the same. For the Scripture says not only of Abraham: "Abram believed the LORD, and he counted it to him for righteousness," but already before that God had also said to him: "In thee (afterward in thy seed) shall all the fam-