# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1861_S332
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

332 Report on the Law.

understand neither Moses nor Christ, and seek and find in it nothing but their own dreams. And here we lay the foundation from St. Paul, 1 Timothy 1:9: The law is not made for a righteous man (such as a Christian is). And Peter, Acts 15:10: Why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved, even as they. With this saying (just as Paul with his) St. Peter also lifts the whole of Moses, with all his laws, off the Christians. Now you say: That may well be true of the ceremonies and the judicial laws, that is, of what Moses teaches concerning outward worship and outward government; but the Decalogue, that is, the Ten Commandments, are surely not abolished, since in them there is nothing of ceremonies or judicial laws. I answer: I know quite well that this is a common old distinction that has been given, but it rests on a misunderstanding; for out of the Ten Commandments flow and hang all the other commandments, and the whole of Moses.*) For precisely because he wills to be God alone and to have no other gods, etc., he instituted so many and various ceremonies or forms of worship, and thereby expounded the first commandment through these same ceremonies, and taught how it was to be kept. Likewise, because he wills that parents be honored, and will not tolerate adultery, murder, theft, or false witness, he gave the judicial laws, or laws of outward government, by which such commandments might be understood and carried out. Therefore it is not true that there are no ceremonies in the Ten Commandments, or no judicial laws; they are all contained and hang together within them and belong there. And that God indicated this, he himself set two ceremonies into it in express words, namely, the images and the Sabbath, and thereby means to prove that these two items are ceremonies, likewise abolished in their own way in the New Testament — so that one may see how Dr. Karlstadt, in his book on the Sabbath, handles the matter just as cleverly as he does the question of images. For St. Paul, Col. 2:16-17, says freely and plainly: Let no man judge you in respect of meat and drink, or of a part of days, namely feast days, new moons, or sabbaths, which is the shadow of that which was to come. Here St. Paul does indeed abolish the Sabbath by name, and calls it the shadow that has passed, since the body, which is Christ himself, has now come. If Karlstadt were to write further on the Sabbath, Sunday would still have to give way, and the Sabbath, that is, Saturday, would have to be kept: he would truly turn us into Jews in every respect, so that we would also have to be circumcised, etc. For this is true, and no one can deny it: whoever holds a law of Moses as a law of Moses, or makes it necessary to keep, must keep them all as necessary, as St. Paul concludes in Galatians 5:2, and says:

*) Luther does not reject here, in itself, the division of the laws of Moses into moral, ceremonial, and political laws, but only insofar as one wishes to maintain, first, that only one of these kinds is contained in the Ten Commandments, and second, that the law of Moses still binds us in the New Testament as a written law in any part whatsoever.