# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 09 12_S6
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

6

mark, because they have retained some innocent ceremonies, which whole orthodox Evangelical Lutheran national churches have had for centuries and in part have retained to this hour?*) Granted even that Mr. Weyl were so narrow a head that he regarded those exceedingly lovely symbols of the fundamental truths of the Gospel of Christ, the Crucified and the Light of the world, as ceremonies which the orthodox Lutheran Church had retained from the Roman Church only for the sake of the weak, which one should however at last now put away, how unloving, how sinfully judging and condemning, how wicked it is nevertheless then, to revile otherwise orthodox and zealous servants of Christ as “popish priests” for retaining those ceremonies, and to suspect them as secret Jesuits who wanted to lead their congregations back into popery! Shame upon a man who so disgraces the name of an Evangelical Lutheran preacher which he bears, by such grievous sins against his neighbors, yes, against his brethren in the ministry, who have never done him any harm! May God have mercy on his poor soul and give him repentance, as long as it is still “to-day” for him. Amen.

The heretics are throughout hotter and more diligent in propagating their errors than the godly are in the true service of the Word. And this is because Satan resists the godly; but the sectarians and heretics Satan not only does not hinder, but furthers them, and incites them.

(Luther on John 17:11.)

(Sent in by P. Brohm.)

How should a Christian regard the well-known events in Europe, particularly in Germany?

This question seems to us to be of no small importance, the more so since in our conviction it is answered quite wrongly by the public here. There still rings in our ears the jubilation with which the European revolutions were greeted here. In public assemblies, in newspapers, even in pulpits they found their eulogists. This, it was said, was the dawn of the golden age, of the victory over superstition and despotism, and the republican pride found no small satisfaction in the prospect of a considerable increase of the republican family. All monarchs were, naturally, merely because they were monarchs, branded as tyrants, whom to drive out was not the least civic virtue, and those who have actually done so were praised as heroes and martyrs of freedom. Even among the Christian public one hears about the revolutions mostly only words of homage about progress of freedom and heralds of great victories in the kingdom of God, about what God will yet make of good out of them in His mercy, quite forgetting what they are in themselves as works of men.

As to what our view of the matter is, we by no means wish to make the Christian an idle, unconcerned spectator, but just as far are we from wishing to deny that God will so govern everything that even the evil will redound to the honor of His divine name and the salvation of His elect, but what in the events mentioned is the work of men, in that we truly cannot rejoice with them. We hold with God’s Word, which strictly forbids all revolutions. That all authorities in the world are ordinances of God, that every Christian owes them obedience and subjection in all things where it can be done without sin, and even then, when subjection is bound up with suffering a wrong, a child of Christian parents knows already from the Table of Duties. Resisting the authorities, and nothing else is the deified revolution, is in Holy Scripture approved or permitted with not a word, but on the contrary throughout expressly forbidden. Holy Scripture does not determine what form the authorities must have, for it has to do with far higher matters than to make worldly ordinances, but it lets the already existing authorities remain and confirms them, whether they be monarchical or republican; the form may be different, the essence remains always the same. Holy Scripture therefore also cuts off the assertion of any sort of sovereignty of the people. According to this doctrine a Christian, as such, is neither a monarchist nor a democrat, without prejudice to his possible private opinion, according to which he gives preference to the one or the other form of government, but he holds all ordered governments to be divine ordinances; there can therefore just as little be any talk of an absolute divine right of princes, nor of a sovereignty of the people, from which all power must first be conferred; in general a Christian maintains, concerning all political things, so far as they concern his own personal interest, one, so to call it, holy indifference. Let those who know no higher treasure heat their heads and shout their throats hoarse with: Long live the Republic! or, Long live the Emperor! let them stake their lives in raving madness, to fight for a freedom which at best is only a temporal thing; a Christian, whose citizenship is in heaven, does not regard the best-ordered worldly kingdom as his kingdom of heaven, the most extensive civil freedom not as the freedom of the children of God; he is a pilgrim and stranger, who passes through this transitory world toward a city which God has built and no man, uses the world and its goods as a traveler uses the inn, not to stay there, but to take night’s lodging and refreshment and to set his pilgrim’s staff further on; therefore he also submits to the house rules that happen to be customary in the inn; does not think of overturning them and making new ones; lets himself be content whether the host sets him above or below at table, that is, whether God has called him to rule or to obey. From this follows also the political contentment, that the Christian is satisfied with any government under which he can lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. If the authorities wish to hinder him in this, he nevertheless does not take hold of the sword, but of prayer, suffers, endures or emigrates. With these principles in head and heart a Christian in the midst of a republican land is no fanatical republican and hater of princes, and in a monarchical land no abject lackey of princes, and, just as he would regard it as culpable rebellion against God’s ordinance if anyone wanted to overthrow the republican constitution lawfully established here, so he regards it no less as an ungodly undertaking to want to transform existing monarchies into republics by force. That is, in our opinion, the right middle way on which a Christian, turning aside neither to the right nor to the left, has to walk, and the more wantonly in this country the doctrine of the divine right of the authorities is assailed (one need only think of the mockery with which the “by the grace of God,” which, rightly understood, is very excellent, is here dragged through), the more urgent it is to impress upon the Christians living here the 16th Article of the Augsburg Confession and of the Apology: concerning civil government and worldly authority. But we reserve the continuation until the next time.

An interesting description of the movement of the Slavs is found in the last number of the Amerikanischer Botschafter. There it reads thus: — Six hundred years ago the whole eastern part of Germany was inhabited by Slavic tribes. In Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Brandenburg, Saxony, Silesia, Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, Styria and Carinthia the Slavic element was predominant. This has become otherwise through immigration and conquest on the part of the Germans, and most of those lands are now purely German lands. Only in Bohemia and Moravia have the Slavs still retained their language and character. Two thirds of the inhabitants still speak Czech, which is also the language of the Slovaks in northern Hungary. These tribes now want to have revenge and satisfaction for the oppression which, from the side of the Germans, as they say, (really however only from the Austrian government) has been practised against them so long. They are planning to found a Czech empire of their own. The Slavs living farther south, namely the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, intend to form a great South Slavic empire, which is to reach from the Adriatic to the Black Sea and to stand in brotherly union with the Czech empire. Very unwelcome to them is it here that in the midst, between the northern and southern Slavs, the Magyars (the rul-

*) As far as we know, those ceremonies, which Mr. Weyl has decried as popish, have also been retained by the whole United Evangelical Church of Prussia.