# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S178
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

178 From the Proceedings of the Rhenish Conference of Lutheran, etc.

no gleam of light illumined, covered and enveloped it, until at last God,
out of this chaos, reshaped our present planetary system — the sun with
the earth and the other planets together with their satellites or moons
— in the manner and order described in Gen. 1:3–31, making the earth
a dwelling-place for mankind and the planets a place of sojourn for
departed souls; while the comets, which perhaps once formed the choir
of stars surrounding the chief star from which our planetary system
proceeded, and which were drawn along into the fall of Satan and its
consequences, have been left in their depraved condition, to serve as
the future dwelling-places of the fallen angels and the damned, so that
they are the abyss in which the eternal fire burns that is prepared for
the devil and his angels. — In this new creation, or restoration, however,
the chaotic condition of the earth itself, as a product of the fall of
Satan and his angels, was not simply abolished outright; rather, only
on the basis of that condition was a new order of things created, and all
potencies and life-forces were fitted into and taken up into this order;
and the renewal did not come about by the quiet path of evolution, but
by the stormy one of revolution and struggle, in that giant powers
contended for possession of the earth — on the one side those
overwhelmed potencies and powers, probably Satan himself with the
hosts of his fallen angels, on the other side the Spirit of God in
conjunction with the creative word of God. For God did not yet wish to
deprive Satan of his dwelling, and for the time being still left him the
power to oppose His purposes, so that through each new act of creation
a victory might be won over him — so that the verdicts contained in the
repeated "it was good" of the creation account mark just so many
stages of the victorious struggle in which the creative word overcomes
the dark powers of the tohu wa bohu and, notwithstanding all the
disturbances and hindrances that they set against the divine purposes,
brings the new creation to completion. "The creative words are
precisely these bounds, which Satan, with all his power, cannot
overstep."


From the Proceedings of the Rhenish Conference of Lutheran Pastors in
Prussia, Baden, and Nassau,
on
the Doctrine of the Preaching Office,
by
Fr. Brunn, Lutheran pastor at Steeden, Duchy of Nassau.

(Conclusion.)
II.
I will attempt — without thereby claiming, of course, to exhaust
fully the doctrine of the fathers — to set forth clearly, in a few main