# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1850 06 11_S166
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

166

faith.” Again, however, there are people who comfort themselves at the point of death with the LORD JEsus, but through their whole godless life disgrace His holy name; — to these dear James must lay on the flax, and say: “What doth it profit, ye believing impudent sinners, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him?”

D. When one hears it so, one is inclined to agree with you.

Br. It would please me if you would take a good lesson from it, and no longer reason so lightly about God's Word. — Dear Damian, believe it for certain: the Scripture agrees! Many a thing seems to us a contradiction only at first, but with time we learn to understand how it all rhymes together in good order. And mark well: even if many a point cannot be removed, as long as we walk here below, we shall just have to think that it lies in our weak comprehension, and that we shall one day see the beautiful harmony well enough, when with God's help we have received the bright eyes of heaven. But what we need for salvation, that the LORD lets us always recognize clearly and powerfully enough, if we only search eagerly for salvation in dear God's Word and pray for enlightenment from above.

(Damian plays with the clasps on his Bible. The Farmer's Wife's Brother continues:)

O dear Damian, believe it for certain, the Scripture agrees! All the hundred pipes of this organ sound together lovely and glorious, if only we had everywhere the right ears. — But stop, you are not altogether wrong when you say: it does not agree. Wait, now I will tell you how it does not agree. With your old Adam it does not agree. With your haughty manner, with your excessive cleverness it does not agree, for it says: We are but of yesterday, and know nothing. Job 8:9. With your earthly mind it does not agree, for it says: To be carnally minded is death. Rom. 8:6. Look, that vexes your old Adam, and because he is still the master in you, he opens your mouth wide against such a word of God.

D. Aha, you are becoming unmannerly. I am no friend of that. Adieu! (He takes his Bible under his arm and shambles off with it again out at the door.)

F. O brother! this time you have been there at the right hour. God reward you for having quieted my anxious heart again. (She laughs, while wiping her eyes with her apron.) Well, you have sent him home properly this once; he will not be coming again soon. God help him, what does the poor creature mean by reviling God's eternal Word! I only grieve for my good cream; but the table is clean. (She gathers up what was spilled again.)

(Communicated.)

Some Remarks against the “Reply” of the Missionsbote, Concerning the Missionaries Auch and Maier.

Sibiwaing, May 2, 1850.

So the threat that came to us from Ann-Arbor, namely that “a more learned man would come over us, who would tell us who we are,” seems at last to have been fulfilled. He has appeared in the person of the editor of the Missionsbote. He tells us in the third volume, No. 3, what we are, namely: “People who have lain in the sleep of unconscientiousness, hypocrites, dishonest persons, slanderers,” etc. These expressions certainly look strange enough in the mouth of the man who in the same article complains bitterly that the religious periodicals of the Lutheran Church are conducted in so “vulgar a manner,” and defend the truth at the expense of “Christian culture and love” with “abuse and vilification,” and assures us that he does not wish to answer our accusations in such a spirit (it should doubtless read: in such a vulgar manner); yet it is said to be a fairly general fault among the “learned” that they demand decency from others but show none toward others. And learned the man must indeed be who dares to charge our Church with errors the proof of which from the Holy Scripture no learned man has yet succeeded in giving, nor can succeed.

As to the reproach that at the time of the well-known mission festival (compare Lutheraner No. 7, Jahrgang 6) we must have been lying in the sleep of unconscientiousness, because we did not then rise up against the honored gentleman and ask him: “How canst thou let thyself be pledged to the Augsburg Confession, when thou rejectest one article of it?” — let him call that mission festival to mind once more, if his memory is not purposely too short. There he will indeed find that we could say nothing to him about it, for the missionary Auch had to keep his bed on account of illness, and was not present at that session in which the well-known conversation about the Holy Supper took place, any more than the missionary Maier, who had already left before the synodical session; that nevertheless there was no lack of pricks of conscience, since the local pastor disputed very vehemently with him, called his view of the Holy Supper a rationalistic one, and spoke against his admission into the synodical body.

But suppose it were so, as the editor mistakenly supposes, he could then prove only this, that we have now at any rate awakened from that “sleep,” which is certainly much better than to go on sleeping in good “Evangelical” fashion.

With regard to the “false” conclusions which we are said to have drawn from his words, we refer the readers to the convictions which this “honest, conscientious thinker by virtue of the Holy Ghost” has attained, and communicates to us in his paper, partly confusedly, partly plainly. First he says: “Certainly I believe that in the Holy Supper we receive the glorified body and the glorified blood in bread and wine, and not something corporeal,” and thinks that one must come to the latter error if one “sticks so strictly to the Formula of Concord, which determines: with, in and under the bread we receive the body and blood of Christ,” “for,” he adds, “something in, with and under the bread and wine can only be thought of corporeally, Capernaitically, and the Scripture does not teach that: rather this approaches the Roman Catholic doctrine.” According to the sublime thoughts of this learned hero, which in the end dissolve in the fog of nonsense, the glorification must be such a process whereby a body ceases to be a body and yet remains a body. Now if the Herr Editor does not believe that we receive the body of the LORD in the Holy Supper — for a body that is nothing corporeal is surely no body any more — how can he then maintain that he accepts the 10th Article of the Augsburg Confession, which teaches plainly and concisely “that the true body and blood of Christ are truly present under the form of bread and wine in the Supper, and are there distributed and received”? and how can we have drawn false conclusions from his words?

Meanwhile he betrays his hiding-place, in which he thinks he has skillfully hidden himself according to circumstances, plainly enough by his own talkativeness. He says himself, “the Lutherans and German Reformed are in the main agreed in the doctrine of the Holy Supper” (by “Lutherans” he naturally understands only such as he himself is). Now if this assertion is true, it must appear from the Heidelberg Catechism, as the confession of the Reformed. Here we read in the answer to the 47th question: “Is not Christ then with us even unto the end of the world, as He has promised us?” these words: “Christ is true man and God. According to His human nature He is now not on earth, but according to His Godhead, etc., He departs never from us.” Now if our LORD Christ according to His glorified humanity is shut up in heaven — how can He give His glorified body and His glorified blood to us, who are yet on earth? But for this the answer to the 76th question knows counsel, which teaches: to eat the crucified body of Christ means: to accept with a believing heart the whole suffering and death of Christ and thereby obtain forgiveness of sins and eternal life, and besides, through the Holy Ghost, who dwells at once in Christ and in us, to be united more and more with His blessed body, that we, although He is in heaven, etc. Here everyone sees indeed that according to this doctrine in the holy