Grace works both things: the cleansing from evil and the imparting of the good in us. What is to be done about harmful self-will and self-activity.
Addressee, date, and source
The Eightieth Letter.
Grace works both things: the cleansing from evil and the imparting of the good in us. What is to be done about harmful self-will and self-activity.
In the grace of Jesus, dearly beloved brother!
From your kind letter of the 16th of October I learn with pleasure of your health and well-being, both as to the body and as to your outward circumstances; and I rejoice also over this, that grace still has its work in you, and that you gladly wish to give it fuller room — which disposition does itself likewise arise from the grace that works in us.
Since the God who is so kind toward men, our highest good, is now so intimately near to us in the sweet name Jesus Immanuel — in order to redeem us daily out of all evil and torment, and to bring us into His house and into divine fellowship — everything depends so entirely upon the working of this His grace and of His Spirit in us that hardly a soul can believe it to be as it truly is. But because this grace works in us in a twofold manner — partly by the uncovering of evil and the cleansing from it, partly by the imparting of the good and union with the highest good — we must take our good pleasure in this too, and be willing to give room to this twofold labor of grace; for it is all grace, and it aims at our thorough and eternal salvation.
You say: self-willing and self-activity are, as it were, inborn in you. It is true, my brother — of that stuff there is surely more inborn in you and me than that, and not merely as it were inborn; but to recognize such things as evil, and to long for deliverance from them, that is not inborn in us, but is from grace. As, then, in the time past our inborn qualities have served us for pleasure and for the false life, so let them henceforth serve us for cross and for death! Let us, hanging with yieldedness upon this cross, consider along with that thief: “We suffer what our deeds are worth” — yet let us not detain ourselves long at the sight and the feeling of evil, but rather, turning to the Savior (who is nearer to us still than He was to him), let us cry with confidence: “Lord, remember me!” All our misery is only to help us forth out of ourselves, so that we may sink all the more freely and the more trustingly into our salvation, which is near, and wait with yieldedness for its revealing.
That matters go well with the learning of your trade, and that you have opportunity there also for the dying away of the vain life, is dear to me. Such opportunities are surely safer and more wholesome for us than opportunities for enticement into vanities. Only let corrupt nature, together with all its lofty and stiff-necked mind, be hazarded in the process, so as to follow Jesus with closed eyes in His unsightly form! Out of such humiliations nothing but glory is born, according to the inner man.
— — — — Embracing you in spirit, I remain
Your obliged, weak fellow brother.
Mülheim, the 8th of December, 1746.
German
Der achtzigste Brief.
Die Gnade wirkt beides, zur Reinigung vom Bösen und zur Mittheilung des Guten in uns. Was bei dem schädlichen Selbstwollen und Wirken zu thun.
In der Gnade JEsu herzlich geliebter Bruder!
Aus deinem Angenehmen vom 16ten Octobr. ersehe mit Vergnügen deine Gesundheit und Wohlergehen nach dem Körper und denen äußeren Umständen; und freue mich auch darüber, daß die Gnade ihr Werk noch in dir hat, und du derselben gern völliger Raum lassen willt, welcher Sinn ja auch von der in uns wirkenden Gnade entstehet.
— Opening lines of the original German. The complete transcription of all 605 letters appears in the forthcoming Encounter Press critical edition; Brief 1 is shown in full as a sample.
German text: public domain (1773–75 first edition / 1845 Gesammelte Schriften).
Translator’s notes
What this letter is. A letter to an apprentice. Johann Adam Bersinger was a young man away from home learning a trade — a small retailer’s business — and he had written in October with news of his health and a confession about himself. Tersteegen writes back seven weeks later, and the whole letter is built on one sentence of the young man’s own, quoted straight back at him.
A few words and echoes.
- your kind letter. Dein Angenehmes — the merchant’s epistolary formula, and apt: he is writing to a shopkeeper’s apprentice in the language of the counting-house.
- the God who is so kind toward men. Der leutselige GOtt — the word for God’s affability toward people; the older English “condescension,” before that word soured.
- Jesus Immanuel. The two names run together as one: the Savior and the God-with-us, “so intimately near.”
- torment. Quaal — paired with Uebel so that the phrase carries the Lord’s Prayer’s own “deliver us from evil.”
- so entirely. So gar — the old sense, “wholly,” not the modern “even”: everything hangs so wholly on grace’s working “that hardly a soul can believe it to be as it truly is.”
- room. Raum lassen — the letter’s key word, used first of the good and then, harder, of the purging.
- that stuff. Des Zeugs — deliberately offhand, and the only colloquialism in the letter.
- for pleasure and for the false life. Zur Lust und falschen Leben — what our native qualities have been for; the answering clause makes them serve “for cross and for death” instead.
- henceforth. Hinführo — an old word, and the hinge of the sentence.
- that thief. Jener Schächer — the crucified robber who asked to be remembered; Tersteegen does not name him and does not need to.
- We suffer what our deeds are worth. His own wording, sharper than the gospel’s “we receive the due reward of our deeds” — suffer, not receive.
- the sight and the feeling of evil. Gesicht und Gefühl — seeing it and feeling it: both real, neither a place to stay.
- nearer to us still than He was to him. The letter’s quiet argument for confidence: the thief’s advantage was proximity, and ours is greater.
- sink into our salvation. Ersinken — to let oneself go down into; and the salvation is near, the same nearness as the name at the letter’s opening.
- the dying away of the vain life. Absterbung — not mortification as a discipline but a gradual dying-off, offered by an ordinary working day.
- be hazarded. Gewaget — staked, risked, put up to be lost: the proud mind is what you wager.
- according to the inner man. Paul’s phrase; the glory is real and it is interior.
- fellow brother. Mitbruder — not brother simply. He is walking beside the apprentice, and calls himself weak in the same breath.
trans. Jarred Fenlason · gerhardtersteegen.com/letters/bdii-thiii-080 · all rights reservedEnglish translation © Jarred Fenlason · All rights reserved · gerhardtersteegen.com.