# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1862_S272
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

question, perhaps still garnished with Stier-ish compliments and emphases: So you hold Luther's translation to be the Word of God? Yes, you gentlemen, and not I alone; the whole evangelical Christendom holds it to be such and calls it so as well. And how could it be otherwise? Does it not sing: God's Word is Luther's teaching, therefore it shall never pass away — and should it then reckon Luther's chief work, the German Bible, as word of man, count it among the ordinances of men? Such a judgment it does not even allow itself simpliciter against the translations of the Seventy Interpreters and of Jerome, who after all not only inserted unmistakably human additions indiscriminately, but in some passages even interpolated them into the canonical writings themselves. I have different concepts from yours of the Word of God. I find it not merely in the original biblical documents, but everywhere that their content, sense, meaning, and doctrine are set forth pure and unfalsified, in whatever language and with whatever expressions this may be. Word of man, on the other hand, I see everywhere that thoughts and propositions not in accordance with Holy Scripture are proclaimed, even if this were done throughout in the purest scriptural language, indeed with the very own Hebrew and Greek words, sayings, and speeches of the prophets and apostles. I maintain, like the common evangelical people, that a true Christian shepherd of souls preaches in his sermons and homilies God's — not man's — word; that the Apostles' Creed, the unaltered Augsburg Confession, the hymnbook of our evangelical fathers proclaim God's, not man's word; whereas the united formula for administering the Lord's Supper, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Variata I do indeed hold, together with Calvinist dogmatics and rationalistic philosophy of religion, to be human doctrine and human ordinances. — But whoever does not confine God's Word and Spirit to the original biblical text, whoever therefore, even in the case of divergences among the manuscripts, does not anxiously ask in which variant the Holy Spirit, and in which the spirit of the copyist, lives, which reading contains God's and which man's word, but rather recognizes God's Spirit and Word in every textual form analogous to Scripture — he finds in both Bible "exemplars," the Hebrew-Greek as well as the German, Lutheran one, the document of the divine Word: in the former the original, in the latter the copia vidimata authenticated with the seal of thoroughgoing scriptural analogy. Or does our German Bible perhaps offend anywhere against the analogy of Scripture? Nowhere! "Even the quite undeniable errors that Luther committed are, without exception, of such a kind that the Christian reader, that the congregation of Christ, loses nothing substantial thereby, or, to say the very least, is not thereby led astray and seduced into questionable or even dangerous errors. This is already evident from the outcome. Let someone point out a single religious harm which the Christian people has drawn from the inaccuracies of our German Bible. Let someone show the false doctrines and views that have flowed from them into the congregations. Let someone demonstrate the practically harmful consequences that are to be charged to these inaccuracies." Even Stier has not managed to find