# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S43
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1902. 43

[The] devils are spirits of lies; therefore one must not believe them. They call him God's Son by way of temptation, to see whether they might perhaps make him proud through vain glory; as if they wanted to say: 'O Jesus, how great art thou, for even we devils yield to thee!' For the devil tempts great people very often by self-praise, in order to bring them down through pride, when he cannot get at them otherwise." (St. Louis edition, VII, 43, from the year 1538.)

The third point, that this miracle (the destruction of the herd of swine), as a punitive miracle, does not suit the Savior's calling of Jesus, and so contradicts Christ's task, which is rather to preserve than to destroy, is settled quite easily. For first, it was not Christ who drove the swine into the Sea of Galilee by a miracle, but the legion of devils who had been in the possessed man did it without a miracle, though with Christ's permission. Then, however, to the question: Why did Christ permit that to the devils? He had after all otherwise driven out the devils from many others without allowing the expelled devils to do such harm, Luther answers: "Christ is a LORD over all and has nothing that does not belong to him; yes, the swine too were his. If Christ was a LORD over the possessed man and over the devil who possessed him, both of whom after the law of the worldly and household government did not stand under him, how much more were the swine his, although according to worldly law they belonged to others. But he who is a LORD over the worldly law is also a LORD over everything that is subject to the worldly law, according to the saying: Whoever is a lord over a superior is also lord over the lesser.... Perhaps," Luther adds, "the law of Moses, which forbade the Jews swine, also moved Christ to it, and he may have punished them for that reason as despisers of the law, just as a prince approves it when a wayfarer kills a highwayman who attacks him."

To regard it so as a punitive miracle upon the Jews who acted against the law may certainly be listened to more readily than when Hofmann holds that this was "at the same time a punishment for the heathen population, which so little respected the history and religious views of the people on whose soil they lived." What Stöckhardt remarks is also correct: "But why does God, the Most High, and Christ, the Son of the Most High, still give Satan room on earth? That belongs to the mysteries of the divine government of the world. Only this much may we say, that such plagues, like cattle plague and other losses of goods and possessions, are divine chastisements by which God rouses from their sleep the men who live so securely." ("Bibl. Geſch." [Biblical History] II, 73.)

Lilienthal (VII, 116): "After Antiochus, in his persecutions, had forced the Jews to eat pork, a great curse had been laid on those who should keep or