# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1861_S380
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

380 Church and Contemporary Notices.

...the translation supposedly ought first to be: "Blessed are they that are pure in heart" (Matthew 5:8). This translation, it is said, contains a doctrine leading to despair. It ought to read: "Blessed are they that are pure through the heart." This translation is supposedly more comforting, for here, it is claimed, "the reference is not, in the first place, to a single part of man, the heart, but to the whole man!" On the basis of this explanation the good Corrector then comforts as follows: "You, my brother, therefore — or my sister — who indeed know that a great change has come over your heart, so that you now feel disgust at balls, theaters, etc., which you once clung to so fondly: you here receive, through the mouth of Jesus, the promise that you shall see God." The words "Blessed are the poor in spirit" (Matthew 5:3) are likewise supposed to be mistranslated. Instead it should read: "Blessed are the poor, or beggars, through the spirit." Upon this the great translation genius then offers the following interpretation: "Jesus therefore calls blessed those people whose trade, whose daily labor, is begging before God's throne, and whom the spirit — the spirit from God — drives to it." With greater brazen stupidity, surely no one has ever yet undertaken the work of improving Luther's Bible translation.

Buffalo. On the conflict of Pastor Dietrich with the Upper Church College in Breslau, Pastor Grabau expresses himself as follows in his Informatorium of November 1, among other things: "Diedrich denied the existence of such an ecclesiastical authority" (namely, that "God has willed, ordained, and instituted, alongside and over the preaching office, a governing church-regiment — that is, a lawful one, just as in the state there is a secular authority — to which one owes, for the sake of its divine institution and authority, a kind of subject's obedience.") "And in this we must grant Pastor Dietrich is right. We find, however, in the working-out of his teaching and views considerable defects, which on his side, we believe, are just as great as those on Breslau's side are in their own way; for his teaching, as far as we can see up to now, is cast in the mold of the Congregationalists or Puritans, also called Independents; even though in some respects it stands close to the Presbyterians, who are somewhat better — but Lutheran it is not." "Although Brother Diedrich accordingly at last rightly and sharply censures the Breslau teaching and shows it to be inconsistent with the Gospel, and in this negative respect brings good testimony, yet he for his own part puts almost nothing in the emptied place that would be in keeping with the Gospel of Christ, but leaves us almost entirely stuck in a wretched Puritanism and Congregationalism, whose fruits are three times more pernicious still than the Breslau regiment-notions. Nothing is left of Brother Diedrich's presentations of church order except the, alas, unevangelical mere mutual agreement between each pastor and his hearers, and finally the experiment of district synods, on the very same basis." Earlier Grabau had written: "No human or free will drives a Lutheran pastor to join an orderly, orthodox synod; but Christ's will alone, who died on the cross for this very purpose, that he might gather together into one the children of God that were scattered abroad" (John 11:52). (Grabau, too, has this passage printed in letterspaced type as his proof.) In another article Grabau says: "Unfortunately, to the confusion of many souls, Diedrich has up to now been, and still is, merely negative, so that they suppose he rejects all Christian order and church-regiment, and teaches in Missourian and Independentist fashion that every local congregation and every pastor is the highest court! The Puritan Congregationalism that Dietrich seems to preach is, for all its praising of Christ's grace, just as much of the devil as the Roman papacy was, and as the Breslau lordly regiment may be." — In the same issue of the Informatorium there is also found, on the same subject, an essay by the Reverend Deacon Hochstetter, in which he turns Grabau's sword around and recognizes the Missourian position in the Breslau teaching. In doing so he faults Diedrich's separation from the Prussian Lutheran Church. He also rejects Diedrich's ascribing to preachers only the preaching of God's Word, and not also "spiritual ordaining." According to Hochstetter the synodical deputies from the lay estate should...