# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 07 27_S189
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

189

gabt, a work which girds the borders of Christendom with a girdle of more than a thousand spiritual strongholds, and which, by the sword of the Spirit alone, in this age has rescued some five hundred thousand heathen from the power of darkness and translated them into the kingdom of the Son of God, a work which has also reacted with rich consequences upon the refreshing of the home church, particularly upon the revival of the communion of saints, so long neglected. Thus, finally, the part of this work which has been committed to our care, the independent heathen mission of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, likewise shows the plain traces of a wonderful guidance from above, exalted beyond all human calculations. The Evangelical Lutheran daughter congregations in East India, founded already in the last century, had shared the decline of their common mother in Europe. And behold! when the last remnants of Lutheran missionary activity were about to be thrown into the lap of a foreign church-mother, the recovery of the true mother in Europe had already advanced so far that the Saxon mission committee in Dresden could take the resolution, as timely as it was in accord with Scripture, no longer to let the Lutheran Church draw in the mission work as a maidservant under a foreign yoke, but to let her labor independently and upon the ground of her own confession. The Lutheran Church, near to melting away and bleeding to death in a turbid mixture with all possible confessions, recovered herself again in her peculiarity willed by the Lord. She that was believed dead arose from the dead, and soon the mother's breath of her peculiar life blew again also over the deadened and lost mission fields of East India, and the children are now coming again to the true mother. But whoever duly considers what all had first to happen in Europe, and did happen, in order that these fields might be preserved to our church for labor and for harvest, will be compelled to confess in adoration that here is a connection of things devised beforehand by God alone, and recognized by us men only afterward, thus a sign through which the Lord speaks to us.

So much, beloved in the Lord, concerning the sign-nature of the heathen mission in general. Let me now

2.

interpret the sign-language of this work, that is, interpret what the Lord would tell us and testify to us by the heathen mission, as a visible Word of God.

The first testimony which the heathen mission bears to us is a testimony for the Scripture, that it is truly the Word of the living God, and thereby also for Jesus, that He is truly the Son of the living God,—a testimony for the purpose of His mission, for the fruit of His suffering, for the healing from His wounds, for the power of His resurrection, for the duration of His kingdom. The heathen mission of our days, its origin, its growth, its wars and victories, are at bottom the goad against which it is hardest for the unbelieving to kick. In Christianity it is not proofs built upon ingenious thoughts and intricate inferences that come to the fore, but the proof of the Spirit and of power. The kingdom of God is not in word, but in power. It is of great significance that Christ is called a prophet, mighty first in deeds and only then mighty in words. When Nathanael would not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, Philip scorned to produce the learned school-proof for it. He appeals to the proof of life and says: "Come and see!" Thus the Lord has given us in the heathen mission a sign which we are to hold before those who will not believe that the Scripture is God's Word and Jesus God's Son, and to cry to them: "Come and see." When John has Jesus asked: Art thou he that should come?—Jesus scorns to produce the learned school-proof for it. He appeals to the proof of life and says: "Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see." The heathen mission with its fruits fully represents in our days the signs and wonders of that time, that the blind saw through Jesus, the lame walked, the deaf heard, the dumb spoke, the lepers were cleansed and the dead lived. And in view of the great signs and wonders in the heathen mission, it is a lamentable and at the same time highly culpable aberration that certain proud spirits of the modern age make sated minds lust after wonders precisely in the form in which the apostolic age presents them to us. Even in common life, discontent with the supposedly small gifts of God is an evil thing. More evil and more dangerous still is it when one is discontented in the spiritual realm with the seemingly small gifts and deeds of God, so much the more dangerous because commonly blindness and ingratitude toward the gifts and deeds of God abundantly at hand are the natural sisters of that Pharisaic discontent. It is always good, when something important seems to us to be lacking, to draw up as exact a register as possible of what we have. A Christian will then find that what he has is always more than what he lacks. Thus we may seem to lack much when we read of the manifold gifts of the Spirit of the apostolic age and must say of many a gift that not only the gift itself but even the understanding of it has been lost to us. But when we look upon the heathen mission and its fruits, then what we still possess in common with the apostles must be more than that wherein the Lord, who has power to do with His own as He will, has favored them above us. Yea, still more! Precisely the less the personal endowment with the Spirit of Christians today is in comparison with that time, the poorer the church of today is in wonder-workers in the sense of that day, indeed in apostolic personalities at all, the greater a sign and wonder does the heathen mission of today stand there, the more definitely and unequivocally does it bear witness, not to our power and to our gifts, but to the power, truth and authority of the Word and to the force of the Sacraments and to the unabated might and the unshortened arm of Him to whom all power is given in heaven and in earth, and in view of whom all human fellow-laborers in the kingdom of God learn, the longer the more gladly, to glory in their weakness and to confess: "He must increase, but we must decrease."

Therefore the plain mission papers of fifty years are the most powerful apologies for Christianity, the most telling controversial writings against the Philistines of our days, the most valuable contributions to the solution of the real prize questions of this time, over the answering of which mankind is divided from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof, the questions: "What think ye of the Scripture? Whose word is it?"—and: "What think ye of Christ? Whose son is he?"—To these questions the great deeds of God on Tahiti reply like thunder, yea like lightning, which through a thirty years' preaching of this Word was transformed from a wilderness drenched with blood into a paradise. To them reply the great deeds of God in the West Indies upon Ham's accursed race, which, despite a hundred years of maltreatment by so-called Christians, has nevertheless laid hold of the crucified God of these Christians with an inwardness of love, with a glow and enthusiasm, with a force of sanctified will, so that the conversions reported from there recall the fairest and most flourishing times of the church. To them reply the great deeds on Madagascar, where the young Christians go to their death with the joyfulness of old courage for God's Word and God's Son, while in Europe, while in Germany, which has now been a Christian land for a thousand years, men impudently deny God's Word and Son and tread them under foot, or with Laodicean lukewarmness carelessly and often thoughtlessly parrot in a thousand variations the old heartless question of Pilate: "What is truth?" To them reply the great deeds of God in South Africa, in West Africa, in East India, and far away to the ends of the earth. It cannot be the task of a sermon to set before you all the great deeds of God in all these fields, and to interpret to you the thousand and thousand upon thousand voices from there. I only wished to point to the many thousand springs of water which the Gospel of Jesus Christ has drawn from the rocky ground of the heathen world. I must leave it now to all who thirst after truth and have not yet found the truth, or at least have not yet tasted it, to seek out these springs, to behold these signs, and to let them work upon their hearts. If we despise these signs, if we do not think it worth the trouble to look about us for them, then the Lord must speak with us as He spoke with Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum, and it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon, yea for the Sodomites, in the day of judgment, than for us. Well I know that the last and best proof for God's Word and Son lies elsewhere than in the sign of the heathen mission. The last and best proof for God's Word and Son is to be found only in this way, that one follows the saying of Christ: "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself." But I know also from my own experience how hard it is, before a man enters upon this way, and that in no field, as in the field of practical Christianity, is the folly more widespread of wanting to learn to swim without going into