# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1860_S122
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Questions of the Day. 122

completed divine calling and election, but also cherishes within
itself a spiritual determinateness and self-determination — an Israel
which so little dissolves anything away that it rather upholds what
alone has reality and alone gives reality: the fullness of divine
grace and purpose of will revealed in Christ, against a bad fleshly
particularism of peoples that impairs that very fullness. And if this
particularism is to hold good more today, in the year 1859, than it
held in the year 1559, as the author wishes, on the ground that the
prophetic understanding has become "more definite and more
comprehensive in the progress of time," then this very claim would
seem, before sober consideration, to have given itself a poor
testimony. To accuse the age of the Reformation — in its grasp of so
important a point, which the author himself to some extent connects
with the fundamental idea underlying the German Reformation — of an
outright failure would require here, as elsewhere, a better proof, a
compelling and tenable genetic explanation evident to the eye. We
therefore hold to our position, and cannot regard what does not exist
as a ground determining the task of the heathen mission either.

But Dr. Fabri has yet another ground determining the actual
significance of our present heathen mission, with which we come to
the part of his work most attractive and more fruitful for us. He
asserts (p. 101) "that the distribution of curse and blessing over the
nations, fixed for this present age at the Babel-Catastrophe, together
with all the accompanying characteristic distinctions, are so
powerful that even the message of the Gospel and the believing
acceptance of it does not free the nations from the consequences of
this divine fate"; or he asserts that the mission for these nations
has only the significance of a testimony and of the gathering of a
select few, but will never lead to their entire conversion and to the
actual establishment of a national church, and that this, then, is a
divine ordinance. Let us therefore look a little more closely at his
discussion of the Babel-Catastrophe.

The Tower of Babel is a magnificent expression of the human defiance
and arrogance that rises up against God. Corresponding to this, then,
is also the judgment decreed upon it, which is accomplished in three
moments. The LORD confuses and divides the language; He scatters
mankind over the surface of the whole earth; He divides the earth
itself. (Gen. 10:25.) Only together with the earth thus divided, as it
now lies before us separated into continents, can a sudden and
involuntary distribution and scattering of its inhabitants also be
conceived. Likewise, the circumstance that, with this division of
lands and peoples, the lifespan of man sinks for a second time by
half, points to a revolution of the earth. But more important and
more significant still is the ethical-intellectual side of the event:
the confusion of tongues. For with this there must at the same time
be thought a disruption and division of the originally common
consciousness of God and of peoples. For language is, after all, not
merely the expression and outburst of this consciousness, but rather the