# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 11 09_S43
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

43

his consort were able to quiet it. "I fear God, in whose sight I walk here on earth, And before whose judgment-seat I must also appear hereafter, And I cannot, according to how my conscience has stood from youth up and still stands, find otherwise." So he wrote to the Elector, and in anguish of his conscience voluntarily laid down his office, which he had scarcely resumed.

Consider, then; these men, who planted and watered our Church, whose writings drip with heavenly balsam, whose hymns, like leaves from the tree of life, never wither, these men, who measured the worth of a soul before God not by unfruitful knowledge but by justifying faith and living experience, were so sharp, so exclusive, and wanted no peace except in unity of the truth.

And what are we to do with our Confessions, if we believe we must take up any other than this exclusive position toward the Reformed? That our Confessions contain the severest judgments of condemnation upon the doctrine of the Reformed, the most decided rejection of ecclesiastical fellowship with them, is known to everyone who knows them even superficially. Is that immoral immoderation, orthodoxistic harshness, a rigor of drawing logical consequences? Woe then to us, who are bound by oath to these symbols or at least belong to the Church which confesses these symbols, without having openly renounced those immoral and by no means unessential components. For if that severity formed the opposite of the love which our Lord and Savior made the mark of His disciples, if the state of affairs of the rightly understood Reformed confession were a different one, if the relation of the two Churches to one another had undergone an essential change: then the Lutheran Church would not be permitted to keep silent; she would have to speak through the mouth of her confession-true members, and renounce in the content of the symbols whatever is contrary to the love that is of God or at least admits of no application any longer.

But as gladly and joyfully as we acknowledge that many believing members of the Reformed Church are united with the believing members of the Lutheran by oneness of the same faith, just as certain is it also that the publicly recognized and legally valid confession of the Reformed Church has remained the same to this day. They are the old banners with which the camps of both Churches stand over against one another. In the same measure as the Lutheran Church has again raised high and unfurled the banner of her confession, the same has happened on the side of the Reformed Church. And even if it is true that the Reformed Church has lowered her banner a little, in order to greet our Church with the wish for peace, yet peace is only in prospect, it is not yet concluded; the conclusion of peace is the concern of both Churches, not with disregard of the Churches the concern of individual members of them.

The relation of the two Churches to one another is therefore still essentially the same, because their confessional standing is still the same as formerly. If we do not reject the hand of fellowship offered us, it could happen only for the reason that the doctrinal differences of the two Churches are on the whole not to be regarded as fundamental, not as church-dividing. In that case we should have to assume that the struggle which our Church has carried on for centuries against the Reformed was an abomination before God, and that flesh and blood, yes, the devil himself, has hindered the peace of both Churches, possible and well-pleasing to God from the beginning. It would be dreadful if it were so; yet if the presumption that the differences between the two Churches are unessential should prove true, we should not shrink back even from so hard a judgment, and we should have to break the staff, for God's sake, over our past. God be thanked that we have no need of that! Well do we know that we should sin against the God of truth if we sought to maintain our Lutheran doctrine at any price merely because we have inherited it, because it is ours. The inheritance of the fathers must ever anew go into the crucible of the Word of God, and woe to the children who do not rejoice when that goes up in fire which is not fire-proof! But we can testify aloud and cheerfully, without self-praise, that our confessional doctrine has stood this test of fire victoriously in all the points in dispute with the Reformed Church. In the period of reigning Rationalism she was as if given over to death. From this death she has risen again, convincing hearts with the power of the divine Word and attesting herself to them, proving herself to believing science, gathering new congregations and penetrating with the old courage of confession. We do not claim too much when we say that in the field of the most recent church history no confession has proved such community-forming power as the Lutheran, and that also in the field of science the Lutheran fundamental view of the inseparable mysterious interpenetration of the divine and the human in the person of Christ, in the Word of God, in the sacramental gifts, in the counsel of salvation and its temporal realization has become the driving force of new fruitful insights, yes, of an altogether new, promising development.

Whoever wishes to survey at a glance the propositions and counter-propositions of our Confession in relation to the Reformed, let him read the Saxon Visitation Articles appended to our Book of Concord. The doctrinal differences are here set forth exceedingly clearly, concisely and with dignity. It is not a matter of speculative doctrines but of simple truths of salvation. What separates the two Churches can be put in a few words and made intelligible even to the simplicity of a child. When the Scripture says that Baptism is the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost, that in the bread and wine of the Supper the body of Christ, given for us, and His blood, shed for us, are distributed, that Christ ascended up far above all heavens, that He might fill all things, and that God will have all men to be saved, although in Christ He has chosen from eternity those who are saved: then our Church bows without quibbling under these declarations of the Scripture, takes her reason captive under the obedience of faith, and rests in adoration in the divinely attested reality of the incomprehensible mystery.*) The Reformed Church, on the contrary, tears more or less asunder what in a mysterious manner is sacramentally put together, personally united, and denies, so far as she holds fast to her predestinarian†) symbols, in favor of the eternal predestination the holy earnestness of the universal divine will of grace. She seeks to bring nearer to reason what is incomprehensible and contradictory to it, by separating the inseparable and removing the contradiction.

*) Mystery. Ed.

†) Those are such in which an unconditional predestination is taught. Ed.

If we can regard the character of the doctrinal differences only so and not otherwise: then we must also hold it the duty of our Church that she preserve her good confession and, like a firmly founded, unshakable pillar, hold it high before all the world. The content of her Confession is indeed not a studied system, upon which she might, at her discretion, lay more or less value, not a human hypothesis,‡) which for modesty's sake must be distrustful of itself, but the Yea and Amen to the divine Word, sealed to her heart by the Holy Ghost and binding her conscience. The Scriptural knowledge which she possesses is not her own invention, but a gift of grace, the pound entrusted to her by her Lord, which she is not to wrap in a napkin and bury, the good deposit which she has to keep until that day by the Holy Ghost who dwelleth in her. She is not so proud and narrow-minded as to hold herself to be the universal (catholic) Church, but she is divinely certain that her doctrine is the catholic one and will remain and triumph even if the historically developed German-Lutheran church-order should fall to the judgment of death. The Credo §) in the shrine of her Confession is indeed very different from the confessionally established Credo of other Churches, but it is the essential Credo of all the children of God scattered in all Churches on earth. To her it is given

‡) An unproven proposition, assumed in advance. Ed.

§) The formula of faith.