Foreword of the Editor
to the
Fourteenth Year of Der Lutheraner.
[by C.F.W. Walther]
(concluded from Part 1)
We, the editor of the present paper, were also among the preachers who emigrated from Germany with the Saxons and, after a long time of wandering, obtained with them, through God's gratuitous mercy, that sweet fruit of unspeakably bitter experience, the pure doctrine of our Church, as it soon appears bright as day to him who reads the public confessions of our church and the private writings of its enlightened teachers from its most beautiful days, especially from the time of the Reformation, this time of great divine search for grace, without glasses, without prejudices, with an empty heart thirsting for truth.
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| Der Lutheraner, Volume 1, No. 1 |
For a number of years we sought to establish ourselves ever more deeply in the truth we had discovered. The treasure we had found and our church, in which we had found this treasure and of which we saw that it alone had it, therefore became more and more precious to us. With deep sadness we saw from the few local papers that we read at that time, partly how wrongly the doctrine of our church was portrayed by its enemies and how insolently it was attacked and blasphemed, partly how almost no one punished these lying distortions and repulsed these shameless attacks, partly how wrong even the ideas of many friends of the Lutheran church were about its actual doctrine, partly how we Saxons were still considered to be a Romanizing sect leading a special doctrine.
This, together with several other Lutheran preachers who had emigrated with us, finally brought to maturity the decision in us to publish a leaflet that would serve our dear church under the open, honest name of Der Lutheraner according to the needs here, as much as God would give grace to do so. The prospects for the existence of such a paper were very, very dim. Our immigrant congregations were still very poor and had to make hardly affordable sacrifices in order to be able to enjoy the benefits of well-ordered and well-supplied Lutheran congregations.
From them it was hardly to be expected that they alone would be able to secure the existence of the paper, and otherwise we had almost no acquaintance and connection with preachers and congregations. We only dared to send the paper to two of them, W. [Wyneken] and S. [Sihler], who are at present at the head of the Saxon congregations as synodal officials. Our expectations, or at least our pronouncements, went no further than to bring as many sheets into wider circles as were necessary to give an unmistakable public testimony of what is actually the Lutheran Church and what is actually its doctrine.
With deep shame we look back today on a period of thirteen years in which God has done great things for us, not only increasing our readership from year to year, but also giving us the grace to dig deeper and deeper, supported by more and more vigorous and zealous co-workers, and to bring the pure and truthful teaching of our dear church ever brighter to light. To God, who often chooses and dignifies even the most erring and unworthy sinners, if they repent, to teach through them the transgressors his ways, so that sinners turn to Him, be for this alone all honor and praise and glory of His wonderful mercy.
What has occupied us primarily in recent years is something that we least believed in 1844, when we sent out the first sheets of the Lutheraner, would ever become the subject of our struggle with Lutherans: we mean the doctrine of Church and Ministry. We had thought that we would have nothing to do but to publicly cleanse ourselves from the suspicion of the Lutheran Church, as if we were still devoted to the Romanist direction taken earlier. However, it is not we, but God who prescribes our ways, our work and our struggles, and it is our duty to follow, and we do not want to resist. 2)
2) There is no doubt in our minds that if God, according to his unfathomable mercy, had not taken care of us and had not forcibly opened our eyes to our Romanizing doctrine and practice, then we would not only have worked here to destroy Christianity, but also have finally been lost forever. Without a doubt Satan had no other purpose than that after our awakening he led us on that horrible wrong path and then led us to America, where we had the best opportunity to preach and carry out our errors unhindered. But, O faithful God, what Satan intended to make evil, God intended to make good. Here we first had to be led by our errors to the abyss of temporal and eternal destruction, and then, saved from it by God's intervention without our doing anything, we can say, as burned children, to bear witness all the more immovably against the same errors that appear elsewhere.
If in the last year we were mainly concerned to present the pure Lutheran doctrine of the Church to our readers and to warn and protect them from the false half-Roman, even entirely Roman doctrine of the Church, which now wants to smuggle itself into our church under the name of good Lutheranism, on the other hand, as we have already indicated, we intend in the new year to occupy ourselves primarily with the pure doctrine of the sacred Office of Ministry [or preaching] and with the rejection of an equally false half-Roman, even entirely Roman doctrine of this, which is now again seeking admittance among the inexperienced Lutherans. May then the gracious God, who desires that all men be helped and come to the knowledge of the truth, abundantly grant us His Holy Spirit for such work, and may also our dear readers diligently call upon the Lord, that He may grant us light, strength, and courage for this purpose. Amen!
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