# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1862_S276
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

-minded guilelessness runs after the rattling recruiting-drum. In their good nature they overlook the church-historical circumstance that the noise-makers and stunners, the recruiters and drum-rattlers, consist of nothing but prophets of the spirit of the age, Union-reformers, and priests of the church of the future, who, out of reflective deliberateness or some dark urge of temperament, have turned their backs on Christian truth and turned instead to idols of their own making. In the doings of these standard-bearers of the alleged revision there lies something fatalistic: a Herostratic spirit rules them and holds up to them the destruction of the Reformation and its fruits as the goal of their obituary, as the task of their life. He whispers or shouts unceasingly into their minds: Behold, for the church of the past, Jerome and the older German translators wrote a Bible of the past; for the present-day Church, Luther created the present-day Bible; but you are called to give the church of the future its Bible of the future! Out of this impulsus fatalis there have already sprung Bunsen's Japhetic Bible for the religionless, and Stier's Union-Vulgate for the still-religious adherents of the church of the future — and who knows how many followers they will still find! We stand only at the beginning of an undertaking which finds its inner necessity in this, that every newly emerging religious community must also have a new religious charter. Here the same spirit is at work that once, in opposition to Christianity, produced the Talmud and the Koran, and that, in opposition to the Reformation, canonized a Latin Bible translation at the expense of the original text. Even though it now still appears more or less timidly, as a mere tendency toward clarification and revision, the consequence of historical development will in the end force it to throw off all masks and reservations; then it will become apparent how the linguistic Bible revision was only the outward side, the pretext and forerunner of the substantive one — a revision not of the Lutheran translation, but of the prophetic-apostolic original itself, which merely attached itself to Luther's work and name in order to reach its goal more safely and completely — a Bible revision out of the evangelical, Protestant, German into the spirit-of-the-age-ish, Japhetic, Unionistic, church-of-the-future-ish, free-congregationalist; out of the Christian into the fanatical, the enthusiastic. — But, one might object, such a revision cannot possibly be carried through. Why not? The times are indeed stronger than men; whoever has once given the spirit of the age a finger will later have his whole hand taken from him by force. If we do not want God's Word and Holy Scripture to be wholly robbed from us by the invisible despot of the nineteenth century, we must begin by not surrendering to him a single letter of our German people's Bible. What matters here is not to appeal to the distinction between original text and version, but to preserve unaltered for unlearned German Christendom that book in which alone it possesses Holy Scripture, and for which it will therefore never obtain or accept a substitute, not even in the most successful rendering. "If you force upon the people