# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 10 26_S35
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

35

on, but Confederation. They have not been able to unite, to unionize, that which is repugnant, that which is separated by God; in spite of all scientific and police exertions the building of the tower of Babel has naturally once more not succeeded. Now that which is repugnant, lie and truth, shall at least go decently side by side; the enmity which God Himself has set between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent they will not have; they pretend, indeed, to wish to fight against the devil in all earnestness, but his most dangerous stronghold, false doctrine, they leave to him; whoever, for example, wishes to fight against the false doctrine of the Reformed, the Moravians, etc., can be no member of the Confederation. We do not fail to recognize that the Confederation wishes to be a work of love and of zeal for the kingdom of God, but the zeal is without understanding and the love without faith. The infernal powers of unbelief of our time have put "the believers" in anxiety and fear; these now, in order to meet the Antichrist and to defend the LORD Christ, gather a great host of all who say "LORD, LORD"; by the multitude they wish to conquer, by the multitude to prevent division, by the multitude to present a great, beautiful, imposing church. That is now, to be sure, quite in accord with reason, it is humanly shrewd, but altogether against faith; faith never looks to the multitude, never to flesh; but only to the truth, and if that but shine unveiled, pure, clear, full, then it fears nothing, nothing at all; the mists of lies must surely yield, even if they rolled like seas over the lands.

In the Union there was comparatively a sounder knowledge and a more decided will than in the Confederation; in the former they still recognized the truth that the Word of God knows and wants only one faith, "One LORD, one faith, one baptism, etc.," and that the Church, the communion of believers, can also be built only upon one faith; therefore they sought to make one out of two different, mutually contradictory faiths; however erroneous and perverse this was, yet this erring will rested upon a better knowledge. In the Confederation everything is more powerless, sicker, sadder; with the knowledge of the necessity of One faith, as of the One soul of the body of Christ, the will also to strive after this One faith has died away. They want neither One Church nor One faith, but an altogether new thing, a covenant of many churches and many faiths, and this is to do it in our time; with this they wish to overcome unbelief. A covenant of many faiths is, however, in itself already a nonsense; one faith cannot unite with another: either it is already one with it, then the covenant is useless, or it is different from it, then the covenant is again useless, for what does it help, does it make the different faiths into One? By no means, for then the covenant would cease to be a covenant. And therein consisted precisely the insoluble trick of the Union. It will be objected: we Confederates also want no Union, no inner covenant of different faiths, but only an outward alliance of the different believers. But here now the whole weakness of the Confederation comes to light. For although it is a mere sham-fight, an empty phrase, to say that one wishes to unite the believers, but not the faiths, with one another, since believers without faith are precisely no believers any more; yet they wish to make precisely this empty phrase, this nothing, a reality, by making of every Confederate the demand that he be "a believer," who indeed has a faith, but is not certain whether his faith is also a faith, that is, the right one, a believer who lets other faiths count beside his own as equally entitled, who therefore believes the unheard-of thing, that the truth is true, and at the same time that the lie is also true. Now the "one" faith which Holy Scripture knows is not such a silly thing; this faith is a firm, unshakable conviction that the truth is truth and the lie is lie; this faith comes from God and is therefore also zealous, as God is a jealous God, and will, may and can have no other faiths, as God no other God, beside itself. The Confederation therefore also demands of its members, if it wished only to be sincere and truthful, no faith, but only pious opinions, and there the demand of "letting stand side by side" has indeed its justification, for it is certainly the part of a decent gentleman to be able to tolerate other, foreign opinions beside his own opinion. But that men are of the view that they can overcome the present unbelief by opinions is a sign how greatly the Union sickness has increased in the stage of the Confederation, and will now probably very soon enter its last stage, that of consumption or wasting away, when then the Union, after the sound members, who have come again from opinion to faith, have separated themselves, will at last die of death.

To this final goal the spreading of Catholicism also will contribute its share, for it cannot be withstood by general human works of love, such as the Gustavus-Adolphus-Society, or the Inner Mission, but only by the Word of God, by doctrine, by faith. And when once the question of the position of the Confederation toward Catholicism is discussed at the "Kirchentage," which will hardly be able to be put off for long, then it will be shown whether the covenant holds, whether all members have a mind to go whoring with Rome, the Babylonian harlot, like Hengstenberg. —

The want of steadiness of the Unionist men toward Catholicism is already now very striking and remarkable. One part of them has too much human inclination for it, the other too much human hatred against it; the one overlooks the devilish in Catholicism, the other the remaining Christian pieces in it; the one goes fanatically too far forward in his Unionist blindness, the other fanatically too far back. Hengstenberg and his like-minded men flirt badly with Rome, and the Union heroes of the General Synod, together with the colporteurs of the American Tract Society, on the other side, go so far that they can look only with secret shuddering even at hymn-books in which hymns for the day of the Visitation of Mary stand, and cheer Kossuth because they hope that he will yet once go at the Catholic Church with powder and lead. In such circumstances the highly praised Union peace will probably soon have reached its end.

B.

(Communicated.)

Most esteemed Mr. B.

You have again sent me something new, but just not much good, namely a little sheet of the Catholic Kirchenzeitung with an article on the Pietists marked three times, in which again there is a violent attack upon poor Luther and the poor Lutherans. If I did not know you better, I should have to suppose that you wished to make me quite Catholic, since you send me such trifles from time to time; but you know me also, that I am already pretty Catholic, to be sure not Roman, but Christ-Catholic, that is, according to the one holy Christian doctrine of the Church, which is our Lutheran doctrine, and in this sense I strive every day to become ever more Catholic. Yet recently some one actually asked me, who had heard that I had formerly been a Jesuit, whether it was so; I referred him to the Jesuits, who would give him information about it best.

But to the matter! You wish to know what is really the case with the passages from Luther's writings which are cited in the article mentioned. So I will fulfil your wish, and indeed first in reference to three passages.

The first is a passage from the Hauspostille (2nd sermon on the 1st Sunday in Advent), which is supposed to read thus: "The world becomes only worse and worse from this doctrine. Now the people are possessed with seven devils, whereas before they were possessed with one devil. The devil now enters into the people in heaps, so that they now, under the bright light of the Gospel, are more covetous, more crafty, more greedy of gain, more unmerciful, more unchaste, more insolent and worse than before under the Papacy." Now everyone will think: the man who has kept so exactly to the old spelling of the words will have dealt still more exactly with the words themselves. But it is not so.