DL 4: How to read Der Lutheraner, and why

     This continues from Part 3 (and Parts 1 and 2) in a series presenting Walther's Der Lutheraner paper in full text versions, and with translations. —  There are many notes that would help potential readers of this paper, especially American readers:

1. The OCR software would not recognize Latin letters along with the German Fraktur font.  So all Latin and English words, where Der Lutheraner changed the font to Latin or Roman font, were not recognize properly.  In some cases I manually made an effort to recover the text, sometimes putting it in italicized font for ease of distinguishing it from the original German text. 
2. As mentioned in Part 1, most of the emphasized words in the narratives used spaced lettering ("sperrdruck") because they evidently could not underline words in their printing process.  The OCR software did not recognize this emphasis, so I manually added underlining in select cases, especially for Walther's major writings, and for all of Franz Pieper's writings.  In very rare cases they used bold text, which was retained by the OCR. NB: Although Pastor Baseley's translation is surely better than my machine translations, yet one may want to consult my volumes 1–3 to find the emphasized words that Baseley's translation does not have.
3. Broken paragraphs and sentences caused by page breaks, column breaks, and within the OCR process were generally not fixed manually.  I relied on the intelligence of the DeepL Translator to make sense of the text of broken paragraphs.  In many cases DeepL's translation, even with minor misspellings and broken paragraphs, recovered well and was acceptable for a general understanding.
4. Proper names were sometimes translated instead of passing through the translator, e.g. Schwan to Swan.  I generally did not correct these, except an embarrasing translation of "Fick" was changed back to his actual name.
5. If the reader requires a better translation than the machine translation, they may download the original German DOCX file and do their own proofing and translating.  I will be doing this myself as I continue publishing more articles from Der Lutheraner.

How one may read Walther's Der Lutheraner:

• Review the Tables of Contents for items or authors of interest, make note of the issue and page numbers, then use the hyperlinks there to go to the actual narrative
• Research the Indexes, both German and English, to find the subject or writer of interest, make note of the page number, then open it in the English version
• Search the text for individual's names, e.g. "Wyneken" or "Köstering", or specific topics, e.g. "slavery" or "catechism".
• In any case, it is best to have the original German version in view when reading the English translation. One will be better able to make sense of problem translations.

American readers may learn some of the major theological terminology of the German language in the process.  I certainly have.

Why read Walther's Der Lutheraner

      There is a lot of theological and pastoral material in these first 43 volumes. It is the publication Walther started, to begin to gather the true Lutheran Church in America. He poured out his heart into it.  His comment about the Lutheran Witness, that it showed "Melachthon's mildness", does not apply to his Der Lutheraner, which is pure "Luther boldness". If there is to be a resurgence of true Lutheranism in America, or anywhere in the world, it will surely draw not only on Martin Luther, but also on… C. F. W. Walther, Editor of Der Lutheraner.