This concludes from the previous Part Pff2 (Table of Contents in Part Pff1) in a 3-part presentation of the old Missouri Synod's reprint of August Pfeiffer's influential book Lutheranism Before Luther [WorldCat]. — The well-known encyclopedic German Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB) article writer downplayed Pfeiffer's polemics stating (translated): "By far more important than his polemical and ascetic writings are Pfeiffer's works on exegesis, criticism and hermeneutics of the Old Testament." Judging by his own polemical writings, Pfeiffer may disagree with this biographer's judgment. — The ADB writer also said this in 1887 about Pfeiffer and his book:
"In 1679 he took a stand against the “fundamental questions against the Lutheran religion” spread by the Jesuit Arnold Engel with his treatise “Lutherthum vor Luther” (Lutheranism before Luther), published several times and recently reprinted."
When one searches WorldCat for the versions that were "published several times", one finds that all of these were in the 17th and early 18th centuries, indicating how popular this book was back then. But then came a long period of inactivity until the later part of the 19th century when the publisher of old Missouri Synod literature resurrected Pfeiffer's work with its "recently reprinted" version in 1872. WorldCat does not have a record of this "recently reprinted" publication, as reported in the ADB of 1887, but my upload to the Internet Archive has made it available for use to the public. And thanks to its quality of print and updated orthography, and to the tremendous advancement in machine OCR and translation, I have been able to present this book in an English translation to a much wider audience.
Notes on this translation:
- In this publication, Latin phrases are used frequently, but are many times followed by an inline translation making it much easier for machine translation into English. Even so, in the many footnotes there are no inline translations of the Latin, so I inserted the Google Translate text in many cases. Unfortunately this machine translation of Latin is at times choppy and not always easy to follow.
- A "Table of Contents" with hyperlinks was added to greatly enhance navigation and understanding.
- Every page number is linked to its respective page in the original publication for ease of comparison and review.
- It should be noted that there is a play on the word “Engel” which is both the Jesuit priest's name and the German word for “angel”.
- The section on pages 194-216 was unclear to me at first as to who was writing, Pfeiffer or Father Engel. After reading it, it appears to be Engel's sarcastic mocking of Pfeiffer, perhaps putting words in his mouth, a typical tactic of papists. There are copious footnotes on each page which were clearly written by Pfeiffer refuting the points made by Father Engel.
If this translation is too long or too difficult to digest, I suggest reading the 38 page Preface to get a general idea of what these Lutherans were facing in the 17th century. — The following is my partially polished machine translation, with navigational and reference links added:
Even with the choppiness of the text, it is my hope that the clear passages will provide the reader with at least a general idea of the underhanded tactics used by the Jesuits, and how this faithful Lutheran scholar firmly defended the truth. As Walther says (Pff1), you "will not regret it".