# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 09 28_S18
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

18

has previously proved that the cause which determined us to that practice was false: so long it is, we cannot say otherwise, downright senseless to demand the retraction of the effect.

But perhaps many a reader thinks that, even if for conscience' sake it were not possible for us to retract out of mere love of peace, we ought nevertheless to feel moved thereby to keep silence, and to let Pastor Grabau and his people write and clamor against us until they have grown weary of the business; there are, after all, in this evil time many more important matters that require a serious conflict; far grosser and worse errors are still current in the Lutheran Church than the Grabauian ones may be. To this we answer as follows. It is true we shall not cease to bear witness still against the gross falsifications of the pure doctrine and against the gross defection from our Church of which the so-called New Lutherans are here guilty, who are represented chiefly by the members of the so-called General Synod; yet this New Lutheranism is already, with God's help, so far exposed to all the world that hardly any man who really wishes to be faithful to the Lutheran Church will still be deceived by it. Precisely because Pastor Grabau's errors, on the other hand, are subtler and not so readily recognizable to the simple and unlearned, it is all the more necessary that those who have seen through them should raise their voice loudly against them. It is indeed true that thousands in our times hold, out of ignorance, errors similar to Pastor Grabau's, whom one nevertheless cannot designate as dangerous teachers. For they do not carry their false principles through; they still retain the good foundation, and therefore, in spite of their errors, which they cherish out of weakness for themselves, they build the kingdom of our Lord. But the dangerousness of an erroneous doctrine must be judged not by such persons but by those who carry it out consistently. Pastor Grabau's false doctrines, however, are of such a kind that, strictly carried out and applied, they must at last necessarily overthrow the foundation and produce unspeakable tyranny and confusion of conscience, and, as is plain as day, have already produced it. Pastor Grabau has a false doctrine of the Church, of the power of the ministry, of obedience to the preacher, of the ban, etc., etc.*) These errors so infect his whole system of doctrine that thereby above all the precious doctrine of justification, and with it the certainty of salvation of the hearers, suffers great danger. There is in it a papistic leaven which has leavened the whole lump. What unfaithfulness would it be on our part, then, if from fear of men, or from complaisance toward men, or from false church policy we were to keep silence! History teaches that whenever in an age one extreme was combated, a party at last always arose which fell into the other extreme. Always, precisely in the times when through lukewarmness and indifferentism men took away more and more from the truth, others have risen up who added to the truth, who now wished to be very strict and therefore rejected and condemned as unchurchly, as factions and sects, everything around them that would not accept their traditions and ordinances of men, while precisely they, if not to the left, yet to the right, strayed farthest from the simple path of truth. Thus in Christ's time the lukewarm Sadducees, who took away, stood over against the zealous Pharisees, who added; and a little more than a hundred years ago, even in the Lutheran Church, really erring Pietists stood over against the Orthodoxists, who strayed on the other side just as much, if not more, and who alone wished to be the Orthodox, that is, the right-believing. While, for example, certain Pietists attacked the holy divine ordinance of the preaching office by misuse of the spiritual priesthood, on the other side the Orthodoxist Carpzov*) wrote among others of the ship of the Church thus: "The magistrates and the preachers sit there, as it were, as the persons of rank at the helm, while they leave to the people the honor of obeying!" (See: Dispp. acad. p. 1271.) Soon after he says: "It is plain that the people have to take part in the decision of doctrinal controversies only in this, that they make known their assent!"**) (Ib. p. 1286.) Is it not plain from this that this man, who wished to be exceedingly orthodox and who warred against a Spener, had already departed on the other side and had adopted gross papistic, hierarchical principles and representations of the Church and the preaching office? Already several decades before the rise of Pietism — to mention but one more example — the orthodoxistic zealot Corvinus at Danzig preached from the public pulpit to the poor people concerning Arnd, the author of the well-known six books on True Christianity: "The devil would give Arnd his reward; he did not desire to come to the place where Arnd went at his dying!" Whose skin does not shudder at such pretended orthodoxy? Who would not wish rather to have been put under the ban by a Corvinus than to have pronounced with him such a sentence of condemnation? As little as we could look on quietly if such a spurious orthodoxy, which would bring Roman hierarchy and papal condemnation-mania into the Lutheran Church, were to rise again from the dead here in America, so little can we keep silence over the errors of Pastor Grabau and his people, for his doctrine is the straight road to such Lutheranism, and his manner of fighting is nothing else than a shameful caricature (distorted image) of a Luther-conflict. Now, to be sure, this counterfeit of a supposedly strict Lutheranism will certainly soon go out of currency again, after a few unlearned persons have sought their salvation in it in vain; while the old true evangelical Lutheranism, in spite of all eclipses (obscurations), will not only always remain, but will also ever again shine forth gloriously. But who should not wish that he may not let himself be beguiled in the time of the eclipses, but recognize the deceitful show of perishable human thoughts and human works, and remain unmoved by the unchangeable truth and its bearer, the true Church?

*) We shall take up Pastor Grabau's errors in later numbers in order and expose them with God's Word.

*) This is not the excellent author of the Isagoge into the symbolical books (died 1657), but his son (died 1699).

**) Rudelbach, certainly with right, already twelve years ago made the following remark on this: "Does not this almost amount to mockery, and must one not ask with deep sadness: 'Where had the tender care of the Augsburg Confession for the liberty of conscience of every individual vanished? Where the principle of the Reformation of the freedom of a Christian man, and that moreover in divine things which concern the eternal salvation of the soul?'"

We do not at all conceal from ourselves, moreover, that the conflict which we shall have to fight from now on is a difficult one. Not that it should be difficult to demonstrate Pastor Grabau's errors in short and clear words from God's Word, from the Confessions of our Church, and from the writings of our orthodox teachers of the Church! What makes this conflict difficult is this. First, we have an opponent who does not go to work honestly in his fighting. Instead of refuting above all our doctrine (let him try to do this ever so sharply), his intention is rather above all to make our person contemptible, in order thereby to lure us onto another field and so to prejudice the public against us that it does not examine our reasons closely, but condemns us in advance. Besides this, our opponent has the tactic, when he sets forth our doctrine, of distorting it, of mixing truth and falsehood, of imputing to us, alongside the rejection of a real error, by an unnoticed interpolation also the rejection of a manifest truth, and then of taking the field against the bugbear created by himself, as against an error which we are supposed to cherish. Our opponent has no conscience about taking our statements and laying their contents before his readers as he knows that we wish them to be understood. Without this honesty and justice on the part of the combatants the conflict is changed into an assassin's fencing-match, in which the honest combatant must often yield the field to the crafty opponent, leave him the last word, and put up with being regarded as vanquished; for who is willing to lend himself to all the fencer's tricks