# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1863_S35
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Foreword. 35

Prov. 21:2. He therefore gladly takes his "reason captive to the obedience of Christ" (2 Cor. 10:5) after his word, and therefore says, when he has the clear testimony of Scripture for something, even when it contradicts his reason, his heart, and the views of the whole world, with Christ: "The Scripture cannot be broken!" John 10:35. For the sake of such Christians — who, according to John 14:23, 8:31, 32, 47, alone are Christians — we intend to ask counsel of Scripture itself, this "pure, clear fountain of Israel, which alone is the one true rule by which all teachers and all doctrine are to be judged and directed," on our point of contention.*)

So that we do not fight in the air here, it will be necessary for us first to come to an understanding with our opponents about the concept of slavery. We know no better definition of it than the one already given by the Magister Germaniae, Melanchthon. It is found, namely, in the appendix to his "Examination of Those Who Are Examined before the Rite of Public Ordination, by Which the Office of the Gospel Is Committed to Them," from the year 1556. There it reads: "Civil servitude, which God approves — as Joseph and Onesimus were servants — is the lawful deprivation of the capacity to own property of one's own and to choose one's occupations by one's own free will, as well as to move oneself, with one's body or one's belongings, from one place to another at will." (Corpus Reformatorum, vol. XXI, p. 1096.)**)

That slavery in this sense is dealt with in Holy Scripture of both the Old and New Testaments admits of no doubt. To be sure

*) We therefore pay no heed here to those who, as we ourselves have repeatedly experienced, now not infrequently confess that, were the Bible to justify slavery, they could no longer acknowledge it as God's word, but would have to curse it as a work of tyranny. In such people it merely becomes evident, from their teaching about slavery, that they have never held Holy Scripture to be God's word from the heart. Should rebuttals to this article of ours appear, we declare in advance that we will give due consideration only to those which engage our biblical presentation in earnest; bare pronouncements made under the aegis of the spirit of the age, however, empty humanistic declamations, or even malicious insinuations of political motives, we will consider worthy of no notice, however much the essays may put on an appearance of thoroughness through their length — for, as Hamann says, it is precisely "the emptiest heads that have the readiest tongue and the most fruitful pen." (See Hamann's Writings III, 10.)

**) Immediately before this, Melanchthon defines civil liberty as follows: "It is the bodily capacity, ordered by laws, to move oneself, with one's body, in an honorable manner from one place to another, to choose an honorable occupation of the body at will, to have property and to dispose of it at will by right of ownership, together with the lawful protection of body and property — whereas the purchased Joseph could not move his body from one place to another, nor leave his master, etc. But it is expressly said: the capacity ordered by laws, because liberty is not an unrestrained licentiousness," and so forth. (Loc. cit., p. 1095.)