# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1853 07 05_S155
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

155

precisely in this papistical falsification the Church of the Middle Ages is anything but a continuation of the Nicene Church, which, indeed, defended the orthodox confession of the true catholic Church precisely against the Arian heresy, and developed it more closely and determined it more exactly on the side that was attacked.

Rather, however, there appears fully developed in the falsely catholic Church of mediaeval papacy the Nicene aberration, according to which even then, Anno Domini 325, the celibacy (unmarried state) of the servants of the Church would have been decreed as church law at the Council of Nicaea, had not Bishop Paphnutius withstood this law-driving fettering of evangelical liberty and by the conquering truth of his lone testimony frustrated this foolish proposal.

An unbiased view of the mediaeval Church (not, to be sure, from the standpoint of unionistic dissolution, but from that of the Scriptural, confession-faithful Lutheran Church) might, on the whole, yield precisely the opposite result, namely, that through the rise of the semi-Pelagian papacy and its powerful errors and human commandments it had long since lost the sound evangelical form of the apostolic Church. And precisely the overvaluation of the oral so-called apostolic traditions against the Holy Scripture, the powerful errors concerning the nature and government of the Church, concerning the so-called divine power and right of the Pope, concerning the pastoral office in relation to the congregation, concerning the partial righteousness before God from the works of the Law, etc., which in the course of the centuries asserted themselves more and more and partly obscured, partly displaced the apostolic doctrine of Holy Scripture — all this stamped upon the Church of the Middle Ages, the longer the more, a papistical, that is, falsely catholic impress, which agrees very little with the simple evangelical form of the apostolic Church; for with this, so far as we are able to attain to a clear view of it through the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of the holy Apostles — with this we ought by rights to compare the later forms of the Church, and then, with unbiased glance and just judgment, the result would surely emerge that, for example, the Lutheran Church of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had more likeness to the evangelical apostolic Church than that of the Middle Ages; I say intentionally, the Lutheran Church, that is, the Church of the Lutheran confession; I do not say the Protestant Church, under which expression Prof. Schaff, in good unionistic fashion, comprehends the Lutheran and Reformed Church; for the latter is in deed and truth, through its unbelieving taking-away, chiefly in the doctrine of the person of Christ and of the holy Sacraments, and in its rationalizing distortion and falsification of the doctrine of election, of the person of Christ and of the holy Sacraments, just as unlike the apostolic primitive Church in the purity of the evangelical doctrine as the papistical-catholic Church of the Middle Ages is through its superstitious adding.

Gladly will we subscribe to what Professor Schaff says on occasion of the above remarks: "If Ambrose, Athanasius, Cyprian, Irenaeus, Ignatius and Polycarp could all at once rise from their graves and be transplanted into Puritan New England, they would there hardly recognize again the Christianity of those venerable martyrs and confessors, for which they lived and suffered; on the contrary, they would far sooner discover, not only in the Universalists and Unitarians, but even in the Baptists and Puritans, distinct traces of a kinship of spirit with the heretics (misbelievers, false teachers) and schismatics (separatists) of their day; for the legalistic and work-driving unseemliness of the Puritans, these descendants of the Scotch-Reformed Church, would indeed appear to those venerable Fathers of the Church and faithful witnesses of the evangelical truth, although they also in their private writings here and there in particulars build this and that wood, hay and stubble upon the one and eternal foundation of salvation, Christ, no less strange and uncanny than the Scripture-contradicting heap of human commandments and heresies among the Papists, and the theatrical pomp of the Roman divine service; on the other hand, they would find among our old Lutheran teachers, chiefly of the 16th century, the sound faith of the Church, together with living heart-faith and upright godliness in words and works, a deep inward spiritual experience and evangelical unction, and would very soon have felt and recognized the unity of the Spirit, that they were on both sides equal-born and true sons of the same spiritual mother, the one, holy, Christian Church, which has been from of old the pillar and ground of the truth; they would also find in the symbolical books of the Lutheran, that is, the orthodox Church of the present time, as a sign of unity of faith and doctrine with them, the witnesses of the truth in their time, at the very beginning the three most important, universally acknowledged symbols of the true catholic Church, that is: the Apostolic, Nicene and Athanasian Creed; and in searching through the Augsburg Confession and other confessional writings they would hardly anywhere withhold their assent; they would rather rejoice that the mass of Pelagian-papistical heresies and human ordinances on the one hand, and thereafter the motley heap of fanatical private opinions and fancies, have given the dear Holy Spirit only occasion to enlighten Luther and his fellow witnesses and fellow combatants ever deeper and further out of God's Word, against the superstitious adding of the Papists and against the unbelieving taking-away of the fanatics, and especially against the obscuring and falsification, by both, of the highly important article of the justification of the sinner before God, through false spiritualism and work-righteousness, to bring the pure apostolic doctrine again to the light, to which they also have confessed with heart and mouth.

Then those old witnesses of the truth and teachers of the Church would find it quite comprehensible that, against the driving and work-mongering spirit of the Papists, as of the fanatics — for in this they are for the most part one — and against the mass of self-devised human ordinances and human inventions of both — for in this they are again one — the Lutheran Church has done quite right to set up and maintain chiefly the following 2 principles, in themselves thoroughly true and leading outward.

1. The divine Word, comprised in the Holy Scripture, that is, in the canonical books of the Old and New Testament, is the only valid and all-sufficient rule and standard of faith and life for all Christian men, perfect and clear in itself.

2. Justification, that is: the declaring righteous of the sinner before God, takes place solely out of the grace of God, solely through the merit of Christ, which faith alone (wrought merely by the Gospel) grasps, appropriates and holds fast, without the cooperation of works of the Law beforehand, and of works of love afterward. The dear Fathers would doubtless recognize the setting up and maintaining of these principles, over against the papistical and fanatical Christianity and churchdom, as altogether necessary and fitting, and not so crooked and one-sided as Prof. Schaff does; for he holds that the Protestants, therefore also the Lutherans comprised among them, are in this less churchly and less truly catholic than the Church of the first 6 centuries, which did not put those two fundamental doctrines, but those of the triune God and of the incarnation of the Son of God, in the center of the whole of Christianity, and that the confession or the denial of Christ come in the flesh was with them, according to 1 John 4, the sure mark of Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy (erring belief).

To this let the answer serve, which those venerable Fathers of the Church would surely gladly confirm, that at that time such heresies confronted the orthodox Church at the instigation and suggestion of the ancient liar, that is, of the devil, which, in part, either denied and decidedly contested the unity of the divine essence in the trinity of the distinct persons of the Godhead, or the distinct trinity of the divine persons in the unity of the essence, and so now divided the divine essence, now confounded the persons with one another; in part (besides the heresies already contained herein, also concerning the person of Christ and of the Holy Ghost) set up besides particular false doctrines against the pure doctrine of the Church concerning the person of Christ and of the Holy Ghost; for while, for example, the Nestorians separated the two natures in Christ from one another with the abolition of the unity of His person, the Eutychians fell into the other extreme, in holding fast to the unity, of mingling and blurring the two essentially different natures; still others, like the Ebionites, grossly denied His true Godhead, while their opponents, the Docetae, denied His true manhood, and both, logically, contested His true God-manhood.

Then it could indeed not be otherwise than that the orthodox Church of that time, to which the LORD, for the thorough overcoming of these heretics, raised up also mighty, highly gifted instruments and pure teachers, as for example Athana-