# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1863_S133
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

What the Apostles Say and What Christ the Lord Says to Our Catechism Controversy. 133

the Christian doctrine of redemption. This can scarcely be explained unless they had, on the one hand, recognized their "double god" in the devil of the Bible. For wherever the power of the devil is acknowledged, one soon learns to pray with Luther: "I believe that Jesus Christ — is my Lord, who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned man — from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil." Otherwise it is indeed impossible, in doing so, to preserve the notion of a wise and gracious God. Indeed, a Pole blasphemed God on account of a lesser tyrant.

Echoes of revelation are of course found among heathen peoples from of old, however much, through the clumsiness of human reason in cultivating heavenly plants, ever worse caricatures have grown out of them. They are just as well explained from the contact into which Israel came with other peoples, in order to impart to them his word of God, as they point to the common origin of the human race It would, on the other hand, be a strange argument to declare the Spanish grape an inauthentic growth because wild grapes also grow in the forests of America. As for the doctrine of the devil, one must give all the Gospels the lie if one wishes to deny it. In this too it becomes evident that the opposition to the new catechism is at bottom only a pretext, and that aversion to the Gospel is the real kernel of all the protests and petitions in question.

d) How Astronomy and Every Other Science Relate to Revelation.

As earth clings to the root of a tree, so the revelation of the Holy Spirit enters into the conceptions of the age (for a mother, too, lisps along with her child) insofar as these belong to the realm whose queen is reason, and lets them, in the course of the centuries, correct themselves. But just as the coarse matter of the earth does not penetrate into the tender fibers, but only its hidden powers rise up through trunk and branches into the crown, so no error of the age touches the heavenly doctrine of the eternal counsel of God's grace and our redemption; but what of it has flowed into the Bible remains, in this its application, eternally true. And who indeed may claim that the Master of the universe would not also make the shape of his creation — even within the narrow bounds in which we behold it — serve the gracious work whose form and furnishing is nothing but the whole present world? Does the mirror therefore cease to show the child its face, because the child has looked behind it and found only quicksilver, where it expected a friendly company? — To take offense, in reading the Bible, at the new discoveries of astronomy, and conversely, is like thinking, before a beautiful painting, only of the threads from which the canvas was woven on which it now shines.

e) "Those who also did not repent of their murders, sorcery, fornication, and theft" — thus Revelation 9:21 complains. Does then the sin of