# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 10 12_S26
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

26

who accepted the pure doctrine, whereby he accomplished nothing, but only gave occasion that God's power and glory in his servant Luther, and in turn his judgment upon the papacy, became all the more manifest. But I should know of no subject, my dear friends, to preach upon this day which could serve us more for strengthening and edification, as well as to the praise of God, than if I seek to show you whereby Luther's work, or the work of the Reformation, has proved itself a work of God. For if this is clear and proven, it follows also of necessity that our doctrine, our church, our faith is right and true; that for the sake of our conscience, our soul and salvation we must abide by it; that we have no need to heed the groundless outcry of those who would gladly accuse Luther's work as a half work, or indeed as a failed one, and believe themselves called only now to give his work its proper completion; while in fact they are able to do nothing else than to botch and to spoil what Luther made well and excellently.

May the LORD let our meditation be blessed to the honor of his name and the edification of our souls.

Text: Ezek. 34:10-14.

The nerve of this text is the divine promise that He, the LORD, will himself take up the cause of his flock, that is, his Church, when it is neglected, oppressed and laid waste by its shepherds, that is, by those who should faithfully preside over it in the office of the Word; that he will rescue it out of the hands of such faithless, harmful shepherds and will see to it that it again receive the right pasture of souls in Word and Sacrament. Now although the greatest and most glorious fulfillment of this promise took place when the LORD Christ himself came in person upon earth, — for then he himself fed his flock, and sought again the straying sheep, and wrested them from the hands of their spiritual seducers and murderers, — yet the LORD at all times remembers his Word, and has always made it true; he has at all times himself taken up the cause of his flock, and himself stepped in and provided help, when through the unfaithfulness and wickedness of the shepherds his Church was given over to devastation and destruction.

Quite manifestly this happened at the time of the Reformation. And from this point of view it will become clear to us how the Reformation was a work of God. Let therefore the subject of our devotion this time be:

The Reformation of Luther a Work of God.

It is not merely to be proved that God had his work in and with the Reformation; for God has his work in many events and in many actions of men, without the work itself being held to be a pure work of God. Reformatory movements have taken place ever and anon amid corrupted conditions of the Church, of which one cannot deny that God had his work among them, but which one also cannot unconditionally acknowledge as a pure work of God, because too much that was human and impure mingled with them, and no healing from the ground up followed. Of Luther's Reformation, however, we can and must affirm that it was wholly and altogether a work of God, because it

1. was not begun from human opinion.
2. because it surpassed all human powers;
3. because it was crowned with the most salutary and most blessed success for the Church.

1.

It was not begun from human opinion. Luther had not purposed to become a reformer; that had never entered his mind. He had been a papist in the full sense of the word, full of slavish subjection to the Roman see; he had with the utmost diligence lived up to all the ordinances of the Church, and had outdone all the holiness of the monks, only to find rest for his soul. And when, amid great and heavy trials, the faith had dawned in his heart, not out of the doctrine of the Roman Church, but out of the living fountain of comfort of the divine Word itself, that man is not justified by his works, that all self-wrought work is in vain, and that only the pure grace of God in Christ, grasped with a penitent and believing heart, makes man righteous and blessed; even so he was at that time still far from conceiving any suspicion against the doctrine of the Roman Church or against the unconditional authority of the Roman see, let alone believing himself called to be a reformer. He did not account himself worthy of the calling of a Doctor of Holy Scripture; for when it was offered him by Dr. Staupitz for the newly founded university at Wittenberg, he made the most humble objections. Yea, Luther still had no inkling of his high calling when he had already worked in that office for several years with the greatest success; for he did not remain with the traditional unfruitful method of teaching, he did not expound the heathen moralist Aristotle, he did not hawk the school wisdom of the so-called Scholastics or papistic theologians, who sought with their learned lumber to adorn and cover the papacy with all its abominations, but he delighted with his hearers in the fresh fountain of truth, the writings of the prophets and apostles, he brought forth out of this inexhaustible mine treasures of wisdom and knowledge, so that even many who heard him marveled at him and prophesied of him that he would introduce a new manner of teaching in the Church and in the schools; while thus others sensed that with him the dawn of a better time had come, he himself yet sensed nothing, but remained small and humble in his mind, made nothing of himself and desired no wider sphere of work than that which God had assigned him for his nearest hearers. Many a seed was in this way already sown, many an evangelical truth planted in hearts, the root of many a papistic error already cut off, and the way prepared for the Reformation, before anyone thought of the Reformation.

The first public step, which drew the doctrine of the Roman Church before the judgment seat of the divine Word and so gave the first impulse to the Reformation, was, as is well known, the publication of the 95 Propositions or Theses, which Luther posted on the 31st of October 1517 at the castle church in Wittenberg; for in these propositions there was examined by God's Word especially the Roman doctrine of indulgence, that the pope, by virtue of the treasure which the Church possesses from the superfluous merits of the saints, can, upon payment of a certain sum of money, remit to the sinner the satisfactions which he has to render for his sins here and in purgatory, and Luther firmly maintained: the true treasure of the Church is alone the merit of JESUS Christ, not the merits of the saints; from this treasure alone comes forgiveness of sin, and it is given freely and without money to all who in true repentance stand over their sins, trust in the merit of Christ, and desire to cease from their sins. Although now the publication of these propositions, because they were not presented within the narrow bounds of the lecture hall, but went forth freely into the world and attacked the fundamental doctrines of the papacy, was undeniably Luther's first reformatory act; yet it was by no means his intention to come forward with these propositions as a reformer. The highest distress of conscience had driven him to it. For the horrid mischief of the indulgence-monger Tetzel took place before his eyes, wrought error and confusion among his own parishioners, and tore down in their hearts the doctrine of repentance and faith, which he had carefully planted in them. For those who had obtained indulgence from Tetzel said openly that they now had no need of repentance for their sins. What pain, what distress of conscience this must cause the pious and enlightened Dr. Luther! But to think that this was approved by the Head of Christendom at Rome was impossible to him. After he had tried in vain many other ways to remove the offense, he came forward with his propositions in the hope that the truth would be acknowledged by all who were faithfully minded toward the Roman Church, and especially by the pope himself. That he would thereby stir up the whole world