# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1862_S178
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

178    Essay on the Right Mean of the Lutheran Liturgy.

-monies afterward and have not understood that the New Testament deals with other matters, and that such outward ceremonies, even where they are used for the training of children, should have their proper measure."

Although the enthusiast spirit wishes to see outward ceremonies banished almost entirely from divine service, nevertheless, in this very point too, it reaches back into the Old Testament and becomes bound by ceremonial law, in that it rejects the use of images in divine service as a thing forbidden to the Christian in Ex. 20:4, regards the observance of Sunday as a divine commandment, holds the breaking of bread at the Holy Supper to be essential, and the like.

Luther, Against the Heavenly Prophets: "Well then, let us go to the true foundation and say that these teachers of sin and Mosaic prophets should leave us unconfused with Moses; we will neither see nor hear Moses. How do you like that, dear rebel spirits? And let us say further, that all such Mosaic teachers deny the Gospel, drive out Christ, and abolish the whole New Testament. I now speak as a Christian and for Christians. For Moses was given to the Jewish people alone, and does not concern us Gentiles and Christians. We have our Gospel and New Testament: if they can prove from it that images are to be done away with, we will gladly follow them. But if they want to make Jews of us by way of Moses, we will not endure it." (Erl. A. 29, 150.)

"Therefore it is not true that there are no ceremonies in the Ten Commandments, or no matters of civil law (Judicialia); they are there and hang together within them and belong there. And that God pointed this out, he himself set down two ceremonies in express words, namely, images and the Sabbath, and means to show that these two items are ceremonies, abolished, each in its own way, also in the New Testament — so that one may see how Dr. Carlstadt, in his book on the Sabbath, argues just as cleverly as he does about images; for St. Paul, Col. 2:16-17, speaks freely and clearly: Let no one make you feel guilty of conscience over food and drink, or regarding a feast day, or a new moon, or a sabbath, which is a shadow of things to come. Here St. Paul expressly abolishes the Sabbath by name and calls it the shadow that has passed, because the body, which is Christ himself, has come. . . . Indeed, if Carlstadt were to write further about the Sabbath, the Sunday would still have to give way, and the Sabbath — that is, the Saturday — would have to be kept; he would truly make Jews of us in every respect, so that we would also have to be circumcised," etc. (The same, p. 151, 152.)

§ 4.
The Coming Forward of Human Action.

However certain it is that, alongside the Word and the Sacrament, praying, praising, and giving thanks are an essential part of the liturgy, this must nevertheless step back before that, inasmuch as what God does to us through his Word