# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1862_S280
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

it is best to stay with the textus receptus and the scriptio that has by now become customary. "It is different with whole words which have more or less disappeared from present-day written language, such as: endelich, Ferge [ferryman], löken [to kick], and the like. Such words cannot be removed without arbitrariness; rather they must be retained as valuable relics of an older time and explained once and for all in a glossary. We put up with such words, indeed we delight in them in Goethe, Uhland, and Rückert — and should we not put up with them in our Bible?" — To sum up briefly once more what has been said: we have received our German Bible from our forefathers, not in order to alter it, but in order to hand it down unaltered to our descendants. "It would be sad beyond measure if the subjectivism of the age found nowhere a boundary at which it came to a halt. It ought, we should think, to lie close to the heart of all friends of the Church to resist and prevent, here, the one thing that has held its ground for three centuries from being dragged into the restless movement of the age." — — Good hope in this respect is warranted by the widespread apathy toward the modern revision projects, as well as by the growing open opposition to them. Stier is inconsolable that, besides myself and my fellow reprobate Scholz (from the ninth Kirchentag), not only Nägelsbach but also Palmer, Wetzel, and others are against him. He does find some comfort, to be sure, in letters of encouragement and thanks for his revision-work thus far, "for instance in the touchingly naive letter of a shepherd near Dresden, laboring in his own circle for the kingdom of God, who exclaims: How dear Luther will rejoice in heaven that we are now being delivered from his errors!" — among which errors, as is well known, are counted the "by faith alone" translated into the Epistle to the Romans, and the condemnatory judgment, ultimately grounded on this, against all sacramentarianism and unionism. By such shepherd's wisdom Stier finds himself edified and somewhat reassured. "Only that, once again, grief must outweigh these consolations, since the market is oppressively dominated by the old text everywhere offered cheap, and since, by the most recent resolution, it is to continue being so dominated through only a very slightly improved circulation of this old text — whereas the new one, despite whatever recommendation, can in truth hardly gain any ground." These are indeed gloomy prospects for the revision. "Yes, alas, he sighs, when one listens in this way to the voice of the literary market, things still stand badly, on the whole, with this highly important matter." The matter is indeed highly important — for Stier, however, in quite a different sense than, say, for me. For I write only "for the sake of the matter in general," not, as he does, "then also for the sake of the matter as it bears on my personal work"; when I take the floor on the question of revision, I do not regard, as he does, my own poor little self "as inseparable from it," and therefore need not resort to any illogical confusion by way of excuse for myself. (According to Stier's logic, this excuse