# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1849 10 30_S35
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

35

in a manner, so to speak, governs in general, as their reason is supposed to have taught them?

C. Yes, if they are otherwise only moral people.

P. Well then, does the Jew worship Christ as the true God? No, he spits out at His name, and curses Him. Does the Turk worship Christ as the true God? No, he holds Him for a prophet, and curses the Christians as idolaters. Do these then worship the true God, or an idol?

C. Since they do not accept Christ as God for God, but reject Him, they do indeed not worship the triune God, but an idol.

P. And yet they worship, and you with them, the "great spirit," the God of the society; thus not Christ, whom they hate, or hold for a mere man, not the triune God, for Him they reject: now is the god whom they and the whole society as one body worship, "the great spirit," is he the right God, or is he an idol, or the lying image of Satan of which we spoke before? Whether one thinks he is worshipping the right God, that, as we saw before, does not matter, but whether He is really the right God. And if you now also call upon the god upon whom Jews and Turks call as their God, are you then a servant of the living God, or also an idolater, or at least a hypocrite, who under circumstances can deny his Lord in cold blood and take part in false worship? As a Christian the answer cannot be doubtful to you, and I am speaking to a Christian.

C. But the Jews also did not worship the triune God; were they also idolaters?

P. The question does not properly belong here, but since you often hide behind it, I will answer it: Certainly the Jews before Christ worshipped the right God, who revealed Himself continuously from the fathers on through teachings and deeds, through commandments and promises, and had testified with power of act that He was the One, living, personal God. If they worshipped the right, true, One, Eternal God, besides whom there is no God, then they also worshipped the triune God, for that is the One right God. Now I will grant that God in the Old Testament is said not to have revealed Himself so clearly and distinctly as Triune (although indications of the Trinity certainly are not lacking); so, as long as this deeper knowledge of His being was withheld from them by God Himself, they could not worship Him as Triune. Yet you must grant that one can worship the right revealed God even if the deeper knowledge of His being may be lacking. This was lacking also to them, but not thereby the right worship of the right God. But now that God, in the completed work of redemption, has revealed Himself to mankind as triune, God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and the Jews have rejected Christ, that is, the true God, and still worship God as One Person, they now no longer worship the right God, but the work of their hands, or of their thoughts, as much as the Turks and fallen-away Christians and heathen. But you, as a Christian, can simply stand by this: where Christ is not worshipped as the true God, there of course the true God is not worshipped. Your society as a society evidently does not worship Christ as the true God, but a god whom Jews also and Turks and openly fallen-away Christians worship; therefore the "great spirit" whom they worship is not the true God. And since you now worship the god of the society along with them, take part in their whole ceremonial rigmarole, and openly profess yourself to them, are perhaps even a high priest — now say yourself what you are. I think, my Carl, that is horror enough to drive you over the wall to the feet of your Savior! Now go, seek out for yourself the curses from the Old and New Testament which the holy God has poured out upon the idolaters and those who have fellowship with them! Gather them into your conscience, and examine whether you can go forth to meet your Judge in eternity laden with that burden.

End.

(Submitted by Dr. Sihler.)

What is Truth?

So asked, as is well known, Pilate, the distinguished, cultured heathen, who, like other Romans of his kind, had learned to despise the fables of the gods of his people, but had exchanged for superstition only unbelief; and the same exclamation many a Catholic Roman and Papist has already echoed after him, who learned to laugh at the legends, or rather lie-ends, of the saints or at their miracle-working images, without penetrating to the evangelical truth, that is, especially to Him who said of Himself: "I am the way, the truth, and the life!"

Yet it may happen that even believers must ask such a question: What is truth? when, for example, they actually see sweet and bitter water spring forth from one fountain one after the other; when the same hand and pen writes, in quick succession, words of confession and of denial, yea of faith and of unbelief; and moreover when this hand and pen belongs to a man who is a leading voice of the so-called Lutheran General Synod and by elder and younger ignorant persons is quite regarded as a pillar of the Lutheran Church in America. This man is now no other than Dr. Benjamin Kurtz, editor of the Lutheran Observer, which is at the same time the organ of that Synod.

This man, namely, some time ago gave the assurance to the Lutheran Standard, a better-disposed English-Lutheran periodical, that he had "always had a reverence for the Augsburg Confession bordering almost on idolatry." How is now an impartial reader to understand such words? If he lets the exaggeration in the expression go, he must nevertheless in any case read out of it that the writer wishes to say thereby that he has a deep reverence for that churchly symbol because it agrees throughout with God's Word; for he could not possibly have this regard for it if it were in even one point not conformable to the Word of God, but contrary to it. Consequently the same impartial reader, who sincerely believes the words of Mr. Benjamin Kurtz as they read, must hold that he has also for the tenth article of that Confession an unfeigned reverence. And if the said reader is moreover a Lutheran without guile, who believes all things and hopes all things even of former adversaries of the pure doctrine, he must rejoice heartily over those words.

But however sorry I am, I cannot leave the reader his joy, but must, God have mercy, rather turn it into grief and dismay, yea into righteous indignation at the dreadful insincerity or the bottomless levity of that man. The matter, namely, is this. A certain Mr. Brennessel (naturally an assumed name) asserted some time ago in the Lutheran Observer that "the bodily presence of Christ in the Sacrament has always been the doctrine of the Lutheran Church and is so to this very day." At the same time he assures us that this doctrine (from which the so-called General Synod, as is well known, has wholly fallen away) is coming up again rapidly among preachers and hearers, and will surely in about five years have regained general currency.

At this Mr. Dr. B. Kurtz has now fallen into a great rage; that "reverence for the Augsburg Confession bordering almost on idolatry" has now entirely vanished from him and melted away like foam; for in the number of June 8 he denies in the most decided manner the fact asserted by Brennessel, but sets up rather the opposite assertion, that, for example, among the 60 Lutheran congregations in the State of Maryland there might scarcely be 30 native-born members who even knew what is meant by "bodily presence," to say nothing of believing it.

A complete victory of this antiquated doctrine, he says, is finally not to be thought of at all. "On the contrary, the more it becomes known, the less favor does it find among the freethinking, practical people of the United States, endowed with sound common sense." So it is also with another antiquated doctrine, namely, regeneration through Baptism. "Can it," — thus exclaims the Reverend Dr. B. Kurtz, — "can it be supposed for a moment that American Lutherans are prepared for such a doctrine?"

What will the impartial reader now say to such a contradiction of that self-vaunted "reverence for the Augsburg Confession"? — Must he not become quite perplexed about the disposition of the man who in good Methodist fashion so