The Story of Lutheran Missions

by Elsie Singmaster

But he was soon to learn that his discovery was not acceptable to his superiors. There came into the neighborhood a monk, Tetzel by name, selling those indulgences which had become a menace to spiritual life. Against him and his traffic Luther protested, first in a sermon and then in a series of ninety-five theses which he nailed to the door of the Castle Church.

|A New Evangel.| The sale of indulgences began promptly to decline, and the money, intended partly for the building of St. Peter’s Church at Rome, ceased to flow into the treasury. The local clergy took alarm, the alarm reached to Rome. Threatened, cajoled, greatly disturbed, but steadfast, Luther clung to his conviction. “The Christian man who has true repentance has already received pardon from God altogether apart from an indulgence and does not need one; Christ demands true repentance from every one,” said Luther. At once came a stern reply. It was the Pope and not Luther who had the right to decide this and all other questions. Thus reproved, Luther began to investigate the claims of the Pope upon the lives and fortunes of men. Excommunicated, threatened, with the fate of the martyr Huss in store for him, but gathering courage each day, he persisted until he had separated essentials from non-essentials and, thrusting aside the judgments and traditions of men, had founded his theology upon the Word of God. Tearing out the weeds of false doctrine and false practice, he cleared the stream of the Gospel to its clear and living Spring.

|The Bible Translated.| Luther not only opened the stream, but provided for its continued freedom. To his German people he gave their Bible. His was not the first German translation, but it was the first which was at once readable and true to the original. With the most painstaking care and with the aid of his friends, Luther prepared his version, drawn from the original languages, true to the German idiom, a joy to laity and scholars alike.

|Luther and Missions.| The interest of Luther in missions has been the subject of much unnecessary discussion. There are fervent admirers who claim for him a missionary enthusiasm which he did not possess. There are others who deny for him all interest in this vital question. The truth lies midway.

Missionary enterprise was not one of the first activities of the new Church, nor was it to be expected that it should be. The turmoil and difficulties connected with the establishment of the evangelical religion occupied fully the minds of the reformers. Germany was practically an inland nation and a divided nation. It had no ships, no foreign possessions, no communication with the heathen world. There were not for the early Protestants as for the early Christians great Roman roads leading the imagination afar, there were no large cities where men of many nations touched elbows. The newly discovered lands were the possession of Catholic countries in whose domain the new Gospel, which was really the old Gospel, would have had no hearing.

Not only Luther but other reformers in other lands were concerned chiefly with the heathenized Church about them. For it they labored and prayed. The business of laying a sound foundation absorbed them. That the foundation was well laid, the missions of later centuries will show. In the words of Doctor Gustav Warneck: “The Reformation not only restored the true substance of missionary preaching by its earnest proclamation of the Gospel, but also brought back the whole work of missions to Apostolic lines.”

|The Beginnings.| There is always a difference of opinion about the actual beginnings of a great work. Modern missions offer no exception to this rule. General historians are unwilling to find any indication that even in the Seventeenth Century the Church of the Reformation felt an obligation to heathen nations. Lutheran historians, searching the matter more thoroughly and with a less prejudiced spirit, have discovered various individuals to whom missions were a matter of deep concern.

|In Europe and Asia.| As early as 1557, Primus Truber translated into the language of the Croats and Wends to the east of Germany the Gospel, Luther’s Catechism and a book of spiritual songs. In 1559, Gustavus Vasa, King of Sweden, and later Gustavus Adolphus, endeavored to bring into the Lutheran Church the Lapps, who, though nominally Roman Catholic, had been in reality heathen, but the effort was not successful. Denmark, which had acquired possessions in India, provided for a minister to the colony, whose chief concern should be the spiritual needs of the natives. The creditable undertaking was brought to naught by the wickedness of the appointed ministers. In 1658, Eric Bredal, a Norwegian bishop, began preaching to the Lapps. Some of his assistants were killed; he died and his work came to no earthly fruitage. But the missionary spirit was none the less clearly exhibited.

|In Africa.| In 1634 Peter Heiling of Lübeck journeyed to Abyssinia to try to rouse once more the churches of the East whose spiritual life had almost ceased. There, after translating the New Testament into Amharic, he died a martyr.

|In North America.| In 1638 the Swedes established “New Sweden” on the banks of the Delaware River in America. That there existed in their minds an interest in the spiritual welfare of the Indians surrounding them is recorded in one of the resolutions for the government of the colony. “The wild nations bordering upon all other sides, the Governor shall understand how to treat with all humanity and respect, that no violence or wrong be done to them ... but he shall rather, at every opportunity exert himself that the same wild people may gradually be instructed in the truths and worship of the Christian religion, and in other ways be brought to civilization and good government, and in this manner properly guided.” Among the Swedish Lutheran pastors who obeyed this injunction was John Campanius who translated in 1648 Luther’s Small Catechism into the language of the Virginia Indians, a work which antedated by thirteen years the publication of John Eliot’s translation of the New Testament for the Indians of Massachusetts. The work among the Indians lasted for over a hundred years.