# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1853 03 01_S86
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

86

Submitted by Dr. Sihler.

Unionistic Churchly Views of Professor Ph. Schaff.

Article I.

It is undeniable, and cannot be otherwise, that the man-made contrivance of the 19th century, namely the so-called churchly Union between the Lutherans and the Reformed in Germany, has on the whole and in the main exercised a crippling influence among its adherents upon the sharp distinction between truth and error in the field of doctrine; for after indifference to doctrine had first been taken under protection in a few places, namely in the so-called secondary doctrines, and its right granted, it has naturally spread itself the broader the longer it went, and has gained more or less a ruinous influence upon the whole churchly manner of viewing things, yes, upon the very disposition of the Unionists themselves.

For not only among the Unionistic zealots, who moreover not infrequently seek or strive to retain thereby the favor of the union-minded secular princes and patrons*) in Germany, but also among the better-disposed, in whom no such impure admixture can be demonstrated, one seeks in vain a holy zeal for the one faith, confession and doctrine of the one holy, Christian Church, even if only in the form of the 3 most important general Symbols; and just as little does one find among them a holy hatred against malicious error, falsehood and lie in doctrine, in which St. John the Apostle in particular might serve them as a wholesome pattern, whom they, in a quite unhistorical and clumsy manner, are wont to set up as the patron of their false Union of love and peace.

*) Thus, for example, the wretched disposition of almost all the Berlin united preachers showed itself in this, that at the uprising of 1848, when the untimely softness of the King for a short time gave the rebels the upper hand, together with the King and his nobles they followed the corpses of the slain insurgents to the grave, as though these had truly been martyrs of true freedom. Had the ill-advised King at that time, instead of his unionistic court preachers and weathervanes, whose hearts failed them in that distressed time because no sound courage of faith lived in them, had a Lutheran court preacher and father confessor of the old stamp, in whom there was in deed and in truth an unfeigned fear of God and of His Word, he would indeed have advised him in any case to put down his armed, rebellious subjects by the superior power of his guards, and, even if by cannon and cuirassiers, to quell the insurrection thoroughly, but afterwards to do thorough penance in his little chamber for his sins, which may have helped to bring about the insurrection, to seek forgiveness in Christ's blood, and as the righteous fruit of such repentance to lighten the burdens of his people, to abolish unfair impositions, and to grant a suitable constitution.

This weakening of that holy zeal for the truth and of this holy hatred against the false one finds among the Unionists, however, not only in the field of church doctrine, but also in that of the history of the Church, which they for the most part view through a unionistic beautifying pair of spectacles and without a sharp holding apart of the hostile opposites.

A proof of this truth is furnished, among others, also by the September number of 1852 of the German Kirchenfreund, edited by Prof. Schaff, under the heading: "German Theology and the Church Question," in which he defends Catholicism, yes, relatively even Popery, and indeed the former not only against the unhistorical and unjust conception and judgment of the Presbyterians of the so-called old school,*) but also against the "old-Protestant polemics of the 16th and 17th centuries," which naturally appears narrow-hearted and short-sighted enough to the broad-hearted and far-sighted Unionist.

*) The pitiful so-called Lutheran General Synod is also in the struggle against the Roman Church and the Papacy for the most part only the echo and follower of the Presbyterians, and instead of conducting from the Lutheran standpoint a sound, substantive polemic against the Roman Church, and first of all perhaps studying Luther's writings and the examen concilii Tridentini according to Chemnitz, the Lutheran Observer knows for the most part nothing else to serve up than the phrase-laden confessions of such little folk as have been converted from the Roman to the Reformed fanaticism, so that it only barks but does not bite.

The beginning of his defense he makes by setting up, instead of proof, at once the assertion "that by the newer researches of the church and secular historians the earlier views concerning the Middle Ages have been entirely overturned, and that it may now be regarded as an established result, universally conceded among learned connoisseurs, that the Roman Catholic Church in that age was by no means the kingdom of Antichrist, but the bearer of the true Christian Church, the mother of the Romance and Germanic nations and of the whole newer European civilization, and, with all the corruption cleaving to her, bore within her a power of exalted piety and virtue."

Hereupon permit me to remark two things. The first is this, that one does well not to be immediately intimidated and bewildered by the confident bearing and the appeal to the results of the newer researches and to famous names, but to leave room for a modest doubt whether the learned gentlemen, whose several merits toward science are not in the least to be diminished by an unlearned man such as the writer of this, may not have had, more or less, the unionistic spectacles upon their noses in their investigations and researches concerning the Roman Church and the Papacy, through which they have beheld everything in a rose-colored or hope-green light, which, for example, appeared quite otherwise to the teachers and fathers of the Lutheran Church, because these had no colored spectacles on their noses, but, enlightened from without by the light of the divine Word, from within by the Holy Ghost and justifying faith, had a single eye and beheld the Roman Church together with the Papacy as they were and essentially still are.

The other is this, that in the testifying and rebuking of the Lutheran teachers in the 16th and 17th century, that which the Lutherans and Catholics have among them as a common ground of faith, and which is chiefly contained in the 1st and 2d Article of the holy Christian faith, is nevertheless not wanting. These points of unity, the attestation of which is equally required by truth and justice, are found precisely in the writings of the most important combatants; and Luther especially is very diligent to hold the Roman Church and the Papacy thoroughly apart, and rebukes the fanatics and (present) Reformed, where in fanatical hatred and fanaticism, against all justice and historical truth, they mingle both together and set the one for the other as of like meaning.

If, therefore, Mr. Schaff, albeit in a covert manner (for he speaks of the "old-Protestant polemics of the 16th and 17th centuries," without distinguishing from one another the Lutheran and the Reformed, which are very different, as in their content so in their manner and way) wishes to fasten upon the Lutheran combat the reproach that to it also "the Roman Catholic Church is simply the kingdom of Antichrist," then he has either not read the most important polemical writings of the Lutheran Church belonging here, or he is unwilling, in favor of his liberal Unionism and his self-made fancies of the impending "reconciliation of Catholicism and Protestantism," to concede to the Lutheran Church, in justice, that in her truly churchly-minded and representative combatants she has held fast the unity of faith and confession with the Roman Church just as decidedly, so far as the latter still holds with her and the Church of old to the Scripture ground, as on the other side she has stood forth against the Papacy and its immeasurable corruption of the Church. But whoever has a sound and unprejudiced insight into and through the historical course of this testifying and combating during the Reformation, and without unionistic party zeal looks at the matter as it lies, will certainly not deny that Luther and his peers in rank, fellow-witnesses and successors, in this their testifying and combating, were just as truly uniting on the ground of the Scripture Word and according to the testimony of the most important general Symbols of the Church, as, with unrelenting sharpness, excluding everything (and therefore chiefly the Papacy, contrary to Scripture, and its corruptions) which has set itself up against the pure and simple Word of God and wills to rule and reign in the Church of God.

As certainly, then, as Luther and his followers believed and confessed the Church of Christ, the congregation of the saints, even in the visible Roman Church and under the tyranny of the Papacy, just as certainly have they with good reason the Papacy, as the concen-