# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1862_S269
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lic. Ströbel on the Revision of Luther's Bible. 269

well-known political processes, through which the original state of things was transformed into its very opposite. Would it turn out differently in our case? Certainly not! Let it be considered indeed: "revision" is a principle that cannot be confined within well-meant but arbitrarily fixed limits. To be sure, it is said that the matter concerns only the alteration of "relatively few" passages. "But who assures us that it will remain with these few passages? Once the dam has gained an opening at one point which is not stopped up again, the flood breaks in more and more, and soon the whole dam is washed away. This is not unfounded pessimism, but a sure conjecture resting on the observation of history. Here the maxim holds: principiis obsta! Once one gives room to the principle of alteration, one has already stepped off firm ground and is on the best way to losing everything. In the case of church hymns too, the alterations began rather quietly some hundred years ago. But soon the innovators grew bolder and more courageous in their approach. Before thirty years had passed, the whole stock had been made to totter, the fountain of the richest spiritual blessing choked up, or at least thoroughly clouded and made almost unpalatable — which now costs us such trouble to cleanse of its rubble." To what dangerous extent the Bible-revision project has already grown, even in the hands of the Canstein Institute and the venerable Mönckeberg, will appear below: Stier remarks, quite correctly, that to remain at this standpoint would be just as impossible as inconsistent, and therefore presses for undertaking a thoroughgoing radical cure, that is, for introducing his own version in place of the Lutheran one. Matters will probably not come to that so easily; but the paths toward altering Luther's Bible are unfortunately being opened up by such revision plans as the present one. For in all such and similar cases, a second deception always pairs itself with that first one. When Klopstock published his reworking of old church hymns, he maintained quite naively and bona fide that, despite all the alterations, they had not ceased to be the property of their authors. So too the Canstein Institute wishes its revised Bible still to be regarded throughout as the "Lutheran" one, and emphasizes this quite especially in its preface in large capital letters. But is that really so self-evident without further ado, when in a total of 282 passages (the "list" occupies over three closely printed, three-column octavo pages) the previous translation takes on a different form? Stier too still puts out his version as the "Lutheran" one; but who regards it as such? To be sure, he has altered far more passages (often merely for the sake of altering) — but how many passages may one alter before the Lutheran Bible becomes a Mönckebergian or Mönckeberg-Lutheran one? Here it would scarcely be possible to find a reliable standard. At least I could not, for a genuinely Lutheran work flowing from the fresh, creative spirit of the Reformer in free originality, regard as such