# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1862_S270
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

regard as such; at best as a garment sewn together out of Lutheran fabric gathered from every quarter, with modern silk. In short, when the undertaking of altering the Bible is to be justified by the pretense of a so-called revision of the Lutheran text and by pointing to the believing and learned people who have declared themselves for the work and taken it in hand, then our principled objection expressed above retains its full force. But an attempt is further made, through other arguments, to demonstrate the necessity and usefulness of the revision. First it is asserted: "The divine authority and normative dignity which Holy Scripture possesses, or which is ascribed to it by the Church, attaches to the original texts, not to any translation whatsoever. It is to those, not to this, that we are directed. If anything here is inviolable, it is those, not this. Of all translations the word holds true: Test everything, and hold fast what is good. That translation is the best which renders the sense of the original most accurately and most faithfully. That the Lutheran translation in many places misses the sense is not denied even by its most zealous defenders, insofar as they are at all capable of judgment. What, then, can restrain the evangelical Church from replacing it with a more faithful and more correct one, or, if it must be retained for various reasons, from at least revising it verse by verse and bringing it, wherever it departs from the original text, into agreement with the same? Whoever is against this is a blind worshiper of the old, and not a friend of truth, but of habit. How can a Bible-believing Protestant answer for it that he offers the congregation the word of men for the Word of God, and thereby contributes to the propagation of erroneous notions under a pious label? To this must be added the frequent obsolete, indeed even by now unintelligible, expressions, which urgently call for a change." — It is very much in doubt whether the friends of revision themselves understand this speech of theirs; otherwise they would surely have formulated it somewhat more carefully. For at the bottom of this lies something that must be called, not mere misunderstanding, but gross want of understanding: complete ignorance of the distinction between "Word of God" and "word of man." This distinction all Bible-revisers, old and new alike, grasp in the spirit and sense of Zwingli and Calvin. Their opinion, though they will never admit it — on the contrary will reject it as a shameful slander — ultimately comes down to this: that Holy Scripture, even in the original text, is merely the word of man, for a Word of God does not exist at all. For they proceed from the delusion that God's Word can exist only κατὰ ῥητόν [according to the letter], and not also κατὰ διάνοιαν [according to the sense]. Out of this delusion they declare only the Hebrew and Greek Bible to be "God's," and every translation, without further ado, flatly to be "word of man." The most benighted on this point is unquestionably Stier. He still maintains today, stiffly and firmly, that we have the divine Word exclusively in the biblical original texts — and yet calls it a piece of utter, no-longer-negotiable, nonsense that I