[ 2 ] When I had heard all that, I went to them (since I was in my
spirit) and said, “Here I am. What’s your concern?”
One of them—I heard later that he was a German, a native of
Saxony—speaking with the tone of authority, immediately said, “Where
did you get the audacity to overturn the worship that has been estab-
lished in the Christian world for so many centuries, the practice of call-
ing on God the Father as Creator of the universe, his Son as its Mediator,
and the Holy Spirit as its Effecter? You remove the first and the last God
from our concept of personhood. Yet the Lord himself says, ‘When you
pray, pray like this: “Our Father who is in the heavens, your name must
be kept holy; your kingdom must come.”’ We are commanded then to
call on God the Father.”
After he had spoken it became quiet. All who sided with him stood
like mighty soldiers on warships who have spotted the enemy fleet and
are about to shout, “Now to battle! The victory is sure!”
[ 3 ] Then I stood up to speak. “Surely you are all aware,” I said, “that
God came down from heaven and became a human being. We read, ‘The
Word was with God and the Word was God, and the Word became
flesh.’ Again, surely you all know”—and I looked at the Lutherans,
including the tyrant who had just spoken to me—“that in Christ, who
was born of the Virgin Mary, God is human and a human is God.”
The crowd objected loudly to this, so I said, “Don’t you know this? It
accords with the point of view in your confession called the Formula of
Concord, where this statement is made and extensively supported.”
The tyrant turned to the crowd and asked whether they had known
this. They replied, “We haven’t paid much attention to what that book
says about the person of Christ, but we have sweated over the article
there on justification by faith alone. Still, if that is what it says, we will
grant you that.”
Then one of them remembered and said, “It does say that. It goes on
to say that Christ’s human nature was raised to divine majesty and all
the attributes that go with it, and that Christ in his human nature sits at
the right hand of his Father.”
[ 4 ] When they heard that they kept quiet. With that point resolved, I
spoke again and said, “Since that is so, is the Father then anything other
than the Son, and is the Son anything other than the Father?”
Because this too sounded harsh to their ears, I went on to say,
“Hear the actual words the Lord said. If you haven’t paid attention to
singke
(singke)
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