The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from An Open Letter on Translating by Dr. Martin Luther: Elijah says, "Lord, they have killed your prophets and destroyed
your altars, and I am left totally alone" [I Kings 19]. Here King
Ahab and others could have said, "Elijah, with talk like that you
are condemning all the people of God." However God had at the
same time kept seven thousand [I Kings 19]. How? Do you not also
think that God could now, under the papacy, have preserved his
own, even though the priests and monks of Christendom have been
teachers of the devil and gone to hell? Many children and young
people have died in Christ. For even under the anti-Christ,
Christ has strongly sustained baptism, the bare text of the gospel
in the pulpit, the Lord's Prayer, and the Creed. By this means he
|