# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1851 12 09_S62
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

62

Luther laments his distress: "You want to be a fictitious (painted) sinner and to hold Christ for a fictitious Savior. Accustom yourselves to this, that Christ is the true Savior and you are real sinners. God does not play a shadow-play and does not jest, in that He sends His Son to us and gives Him up for us."

Then the LORD sent Luther, out of the same mouth, when he had a hard trial and temptation concerning God's foreknowledge and election of grace, new comfort through the words: "In the wounds of Christ foreknowledge is understood and found, otherwise nowhere at all; for it is written: Him shall ye hear. The Father is too high; therefore He says: I will give you a way whereby one may come to me, namely Christ; believe in Him and cleave to Him; so it will be found out well enough in due time who I am. For God is incomprehensible, and we can neither understand nor think what He is, much less how He is minded; He also cannot be comprehended and will in short be ungraspable, except in Christ."

Furthermore, when the discussion once turned to the word poenitentia or repentance, Staupitz said: there was no true repentance except that which flows from the love of God and of His righteousness; and this word stuck — as Luther himself later related to Staupitz when sending him his Theses — in his soul "like the sharp arrow of a mighty man."

Thereto the Spirit of God drove him ever more into the Holy Scripture, and more and more he was first illumined, but, the longer the more, also inwardly enlightened by the saving truth of the Gospel, especially in the Epistles of St. Paul: that the sinner in Adam is declared righteous before God and His judgment, and absolved of his guilt, alone by grace through the merit of Christ, which he lays hold of and appropriates solely and exclusively by means of faith, without the deeds of the Law.

But only little by little did this saving truth from God's Word become inwardly bright and clear to him; slowly and gradually he first attained to the inward divine certainty of it and to the true inward experience of justifying faith; long did the papistical errors resist in him this blessed truth of the Gospel; long did the haughty, work-righteous monk in him rebel against the all-sufficient and perfectly good merit of Christ; and although the saying, "The just shall live by his faith," had already earlier, with its divine power, touched his heart in many ways and passed mightily through it, yet when in 1510, on business of his Order, he was staying in Rome, he was still such a "mad saint," as he calls himself, that he slid up on his knees the steps of the so-called Pilate's Stairs, in order to receive the indulgence which the pope had promised to those who should perform such a work.

Then it happened, however, while he, in his conscience still held captive in human doctrine, was performing such foolish work, that all at once he felt no differently than as if a voice of thunder called to him: "The just shall live by his faith."

After his return home, however, he went anew to consider and weigh this saying yet more exactly and sharply in and with the Scripture; and at last this sun of the evangelical truth broke with great power through the mists of the doctrine of the Law and of men in his soul and filled his heart with righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost, of which he himself writes these memorable words: "Here I felt at once that I was born quite anew and had found, as it were, a wide-open door to go into Paradise itself; the dear Holy Scripture also looked upon me now quite differently from before, so that I ran forthwith through the whole Bible, as far as I could remember it, and gathered also in other words, according to this rule, all their interpretation together, as, that the work of God means that which God works in us; the power of God, by which He makes us mighty and strong; the wisdom of God, by which He makes us wise; so also the others, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God, and the like. As I had before hated this little word "the righteousness of God" with true earnestness, so I began, on the contrary, to esteem it dear and high as my most beloved and comforting word, and this very place in St. Paul was now in truth the right gate of Paradise."

And the same saving truth of justifying faith he also testifies later, in a letter to his friend and fellow monk Georg Spenlein in Memmingen, wherein he writes among other things thus: "Therefore, my dear brother, learn Christ, and Christ crucified, learn to sing to Him and, despairing of thyself, say: "Thou, my Lord Jesus, art my righteousness, but I am Thy sin. Thou hast taken upon Thee what is mine and hast given me what is Thine. Thou hast taken upon Thee what Thou wast not, and hast given me what I was not."

(Conclusion to follow.)

Correction of an Article in the "kirchliches Informatorium" of Pastor Grabau, Concerning the Affairs of the Lutheran Congregation at Detroit, Mich.

(Continuation.)

His determined intention, to have the matter handled absolutely by a committee to be called, Winkler had declared in blunt words at the close of the letter already cited, of the 16th of March of last year. It read therein:

"The undersigned's choice has already been made: it is now incumbent upon you, as complainants, to make your choice also, that the matter may find a settlement. — You may send in your choice, once made, in writing, either to me or otherwise to a member of the church council, in short order."

It is remarkable that he, here as nowhere else, mentions whom he on his part had called as committee member, and yet says in No. 3 of the kirchliches Informatorium that his choice was not according to the wish of those preachers of the Missouri Synod who had taken part in this affair; indeed, he takes the trouble to prove at length with reasons why his choice had to turn out thus and not otherwise. Yet Pastor Winkler knows full well that the undersigned first learned from his mouth on the 15th of June, at the end of his negotiations with him, whom he had selected as committee member. Of a satisfaction or dissatisfaction with his choice there can therefore be no talk at all. But so it goes, when one has once resolved at any price to present a bad cause as good: then one cannot leave off inventing and lying even where it does not in the least serve the evil purpose. Winkler relates further: the complainants had indeed accepted the proposed way of investigation, but for weeks had let nothing be heard or seen that they were doing anything in the matter. This also is not in accord with the truth. In a letter of the 21st of March the people had indeed consented, although "not as complainants, but as petitioners," to submit the matter "to an honest, competent, confession-true, churchly court for investigation and respective decision," but had also requested that Winkler should name to them his committee member, so that their choice might not fall upon the same man and delay arise again. Since now Winkler in his answer of the 26th of March was unwilling to grant this request, the people turned in writing already on the following day to the President of our Synod with the request that he take up their cause. He, too, had already by the 5th of April sent word to the undersigned that he entrusted him with this affair and had asked him to betake himself to Detroit for that purpose. The letter which contained this bears the St. Louis postmark of the 7th of April, but unfortunately, instead of going directly to Bridgeport (the then post office of the undersigned), it went first astray to Bridgewater, as can be plainly seen on the cover, and so it arrived at its destination only on the 24th of April. Meanwhile Winkler had written to the people on the 9th of April as follows:

"As already happened on the 16th and the 26th of March, you are hereby once more urgently requested to choose your part of the committee and to appoint to us the time when our part shall be here. If nothing of the kind takes place within the next three days, we are compelled, without regard to later arrangements on your part, to go our own ways in this matter."

This seemed even to two of his elders to