# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1851 12 23_S70
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

70

quoted 62nd Thesis, and fruitful seeds for the purification of doctrine and Church; and precisely this peculiar mixture of his propositions was surely the cause that they, as though the angels had been couriers, became known in fourteen days throughout all Germany, in four to six weeks throughout all Europe, and produced a mighty commotion, for or against; for hardly would men’s minds at that time have been already prepared and receptive for such a writing as he furnished three years later in the little book: von der babylonischen Gefängniß der Kirche, in which he quite openly and without disguise attacks and casts to the ground, with God’s Word, the unscriptural presumption and tyranny of the Papacy.

It is not now our purpose, at this time, to show more exactly, on both sides, the reception and effect of these 95 Propositions of Luther. Only so much may be remarked here, that this effect was twofold and opposite, especially among the learned, priests and monks. Those, namely, who bore a hearty longing for the essential divine truth, which satisfies heart and head together, were sweetly illumined and enlightened by the Gospel shining through these 95 Propositions, so that a new stirring and moving came into their soul; the blind adherents and worshippers of the Papacy, on the other hand, whether from honest devotion or for the sake of the belly and of favor, took from Luther’s Theses the offense and scandal that was not given at all, as though he were rising up in hostile and presumptuous fashion against the Pope, and repeatedly attacked him with angry and venomous writings.

But precisely thereby it came to pass, under God’s gracious guidance, that Luther was driven ever deeper into the Word of God and was enlightened by the Holy Ghost therefrom, to recognize ever more thoroughly the antichristian monster of the Papacy and its immeasurable corruption of the Church in doctrine and life, and to testify ever more powerfully against it; for which the LORD gave him from within an undaunted courage of faith, and in the course of the next years added from without these and those fellow-witnesses and evangelical confessors stirred up through him.

But neither Luther, nor his later fellow-combatants *) — a Melanchthon, Joh. Brentz, Bugenhagen, and others, had ever taken it into their minds to purify the corrupted doctrine of the Church from the foundation up and to reform the Church, although God, without their willing and purposing, nevertheless carried out so great a matter through their service. Rather, their testifying and contending stood upon the following grounds and causes:

*) That Zwingli, Calvin and others are not included among these is self-evident, partly because these fell into errors opposed to the papistic ones, partly because in their testimony they did not, like Luther and his friends, proceed from the true Church of Christ, still hidden under the Papacy, and did not hold fast, beneath the chaff of the papistic errors, the seed-grains of evangelical truth, yea the sum of the primeval and ever new confession of the Church, essentially always remaining the same.

First, namely, it was required by God’s honor that the purity and truth of his evangelical Word be recognized by all, how it shines in, shines through, and casts down, as the sun of the Spirit, all papistic darkness and mist, which had hitherto enveloped and held captive Christendom, and thereby that the Holy Scripture in general, clear and plain in itself and to be explained by itself, be again universally acknowledged as the sole ground and source of church doctrine, as the proper and essential judge of all controversies of faith and doctrine, as the one rule and norm also of all God-pleasing conduct and life of Christians, without the coördinate addition of so-called apostolic traditions, doctrines of men and commandments of men.

Secondly, their testimony was demanded by their conscience, cleansed through the Gospel and faith, which could not possibly keep silent and would have had to judge and condemn them inwardly, if they had suppressed, from fear of men and care for the belly, the knowledge, just newly gained from God’s Word, of this and that evangelical truth and at the same time of this and that papistic error, and by such cowardly silence had confirmed the impudent assertions of the defenders of the Papacy and thereby at the same time ruined their own souls.

Thirdly, it was in like manner demanded by love of the neighbor and the welfare of the brethren, in order not to withhold from them the light of truth unto salvation, gained from his Word through a special illumination of the Holy Ghost, but thereby to free them from the chains and bonds of the papistic errors, and chiefly through the evangelical doctrine of the all-sufficient and alone and fully valid merit of Christ, for the justification of the sinner before God, who lays hold of it in faith and appropriates it to himself, without the works, to help them to the comforting and blessed assurance of the forgiveness of sins and of eternal life.

Fourthly and finally, the testimony of Luther and of his fellow-witnesses and fellow-combatants against the corruptions of the Papacy became necessary in order thereby at the same time to attest their unity of faith and doctrine with the One holy Christian, Catholic-Apostolic Church from the beginning, which was indeed hidden here and there in this and that upright Christian and true child of God even under the Papacy, and which also very soon recognized the voice of Christ, her Bridegroom, in the evangelical testimony of Luther and his friends. For they did not wish to bring forward something new, strange to the Word and the Church of the LORD, as the wretched Papacy has done and as the enthusiasts of all times and peoples likewise do with their peculiar little inventions of men, but the primeval and yet at the same time ever new faith, confession and doctrine of the Church of God, on the ground of his Word, they wished only to purify from the filth and refuse heaped upon it of the older Pelagian heresies and the newer papistic ordinances of men; the holy truth of this confession of the Church of Christ, always like itself and essentially unchangeable, they wished to bring again to light out of the rubbish of old and new errors, to free the holy beauty of this faith of the Church of the LORD from the disfiguring deformity and distortion of the hideous Papacy, and to paint it anew before the eyes of all who were willing to see.

These were the chief grounds of their testimony against the corruption of Papism; and since the same, with its “strong delusions,” under God’s permission and through Satan’s working, to all appearance is again gaining new power and strength in these days, now in a gross and conspicuous manner, as in the zealous teaching and working of the Jesuits, now in a more disguised manner, as in Puseyism and its effects in England, now in an almost imperceptible and more secret manner here and there within the Lutheran Church itself, it might well be time that the sound sons of the Lutheran, that is, orthodox Church should take after their fathers and, from the same grounds, raise the essentially same testimony against the essentially same Papacy of old and new times; for, for example, with the frivolous, womanish, partisan chattering, scolding and railing of the Reformed-Methodistic so-called Lutheran General Synod in its Lutheran Observer, this echo of Reformed scribbling-sheets against the Papacy, a mortal wound might be dealt to it about as well as to a bear which a boy pricks with a straw.

To such sound-Lutheran, that is, churchly testifying against the antichristian and anti-churchly Papacy, old and new, there belongs, however, chiefly, that the manly and valiant sons of the Church first sit down at the feet of their fathers, and chiefly of the great champion and faithful witness, Dr. Martin Luther, and of his peer in birth of spirit, the son and combatant of the Papacy, a Martin Chemnitz *), and first learn from them how they wielded the sword of the Spirit, that is, the Word of God, against the lies and errors of the Papacy and really dealt it a mortal wound.

*) In his examen Concilii tridentini, that is, Examination of the Decrees of the Council of Trent, in which the papistic errors against the evangelical truth were ecclesiastically established and confirmed.

For only thus can it come to pass that they, in historical connection, worthily rank themselves, as the faithful witnesses of the present, with the great champions and pathbreakers of the past, who undeniably for such a great and noble conflict and victory were equipped by the Holy Ghost with glorious gifts and chiefly with the