# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1862_S278
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

every new authority could claim the same right to alter the Bible as its predecessor. Now imagine this process continued for, say, a century, and try to picture the babylonian confusion which, after the lapse of that period, would prevail in a domain where a happy unity still prevails today. Would not this unity, this genuine union — founded not by cabinet decrees but by God Himself — suffer an incurable rupture, if that firm bond were to fall away? It is, after all, something great and glorious to be conscious that the same Word of God, like a watchword, known to all German-speaking Protestants, passes from mouth to mouth, resounds from every pulpit, is read in every household. And is this glorious unity, for which we ought to thank God daily on our knees, to be destroyed, torn apart? And that for the sake of a number of passages in which the translation departs from the strict sense of the original text?" To this must be added one more thing, which weighs no less heavily. "What harm would come to the Christian life of individuals and of congregations from the abolition of the unaltered Bible? Can we deny that the treasury of our church hymns has forfeited the greater part of its beneficial effect upon our people, ever since in that domain unity has had to yield to a motley diversity? Would it go otherwise with the Bible? Where would that firmness in the Bible remain which our fathers possessed in so glorious a measure, and which we, at least in part, to our blessing, still possess? How could preachers, teachers, and pupils apply the same diligence to impress firmly and lastingly upon themselves and others a word which did not remain the same, but, like Proteus, changed its shape from time to time? What an inestimable blessing it is that grandchildren read and know the very same word that their grandfathers read and knew! that amid all change this word always remains the same! that one can be sure of meeting the same word everywhere, wherever one goes, as far as the German tongue resounds! Were this church unity ever lost, men would wish it back with bloody tears, and yet in vain. And are we, who still possess it, this unity, to throw away this precious good wantonly, for the sake of some imagined advantage that would have no bearing for eternity? Let it only be considered what it means when the conviction of the people, that in Luther's work they possess the correct Bible, is shaken; when, through certain measures of the ecclesiastical authorities, the people are led into confusion in this conviction. Who would wish, who could bear, to take upon himself the responsibility for the harm done to souls?" — But, it is objected, the Lutheran Bible not infrequently lacks, for our time, clarity and intelligibility. How much of what was generally intelligible at the time of the Reformation is

no longer so, or has a quite different meaning than it had then! Well now, these are just the familiar arguments that were also urged in favor of altering the church hymns. The language, one says, the