# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1861_S322
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

322 Report on the Law.

given it to the Jews, is therefore a lack of the right understanding of the law; whereas the New Testament manner in which the Lutheran catechism contains the holy Ten Commandments is a glorious testimony to the pure knowledge and the deep understanding which Luther and the Lutheran Church have of this matter.

4. Neither the holy Ten Commandments nor any Old Testament law binds the Christian for the reason that they were revealed by God through Moses, for as a written law they were laid upon the segregated people of the old covenant, the Jews, alone.

5. What, within the holy Ten Commandments and within all the other laws contained in the Old Testament, belongs to the natural law, Christ shows first of all by saying that on the two commandments of love for God and for one's neighbor hang the whole Law and the Prophets (Matthew 22:36–40), and in another place, that the Law and the Prophets are summed up in the word: "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." Matthew 7:12. Whatever, then, belongs to this summary and chief commandment also belongs, according to Christ's own revelation, to the natural law binding all men even in the New Testament. But because the writing of the law engraved on the human heart at the first creation has, after the Fall, become very much faded, and is not, even after regeneration and in the renewal wrought in the Christian, fully restored again in this life, we must, secondly, also recognize whether a law in the Old Testament belongs to the natural law from this: whether God, through his prophets, punishes the transgression of it also among the heathen as sin and abomination; and finally, thirdly, whether the law is repeated and confirmed in the New Testament as one that binds Christians as well.

6. It is true that believing Christians, as such and to the extent that they are such, are no longer under the Law but free from all law, for, says holy Paul, the law is not made for a righteous man; but not in such a way that they could or would live freely against the eternal, holy will of God revealed in the Law — rather, insofar as they, whom Christ has redeemed from the curse and compulsion of the Law, have through faith and regeneration themselves become a law unto themselves, and therefore keep and fulfill the Law not as law, but out of the impulse of their new nature, in free love — not because they must, but because they will, since God's will has become their will. Luther explains this freedom with the following beautiful parable, taken from Paul (Gal. 3:23): "If your lord had held you captive in a dungeon and you were exceedingly unwilling to be in it, one could redeem you from it in two ways. First, bodily — that the lord should break open the dungeon and set you free bodily, letting you go wherever you wished. Second, if he did so much good to you in the dungeon, making it pleasant, bright, spacious, and decorated in the most sumptuous manner, so that no royal chamber or palace was so adorned, and