# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1863_S134
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

sorcery does not die out (see also Revelation 22:15), then in no exposition of the Second Commandment may the instruction concerning it be lacking. (cf. Acts 8:9; 13:8; 16:16.)

A. That a catechism should correspond to "the average standpoint of the age's culture" in the sense meant here — namely, in order to set aside doctrines acknowledged by our confession — presupposes a contempt for the Church and her servants similar to the threat to go over to another confession should the gentlemen's wishes not be granted. But in the instruction given to the servants of God it stands written: "If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ!" (Gal. 1:10.)

f) The Opposition to Articles of Faith Is No Progress of the Age.

Those who set themselves in opposition to the old revealed truths of the Christian religion gladly justify themselves with a reference to the progress of our century. In their eyes it is an irrefutable proof. They take refuge in it as often as the fresh air of Christian-believing confession brings on a malaise in their delicate nerves. It seems to be a universal remedy for unbelief. — Yet they err greatly when they take their aversion to the faith for a fruit of the age's culture and a progress. Rather, the Bible testifies to us that it is at the very least not much younger than faith itself. A few examples may prove this.

The "serpent" already says "in Paradise" to Eve: "Did God really say...?" Even if we go along with the notion that the first chapters of the Bible are human poetry, it is nevertheless clear from this that the author of the first Book of Moses was, at the very least, not unacquainted with the astonishment with which human reason still regards such a prohibition to this day: "Thou shalt not eat of this one tree!" From it, rather, he derives sin, misery, and death. Indeed, this author strikes the root of unbelief so precisely that he declares devilish the very thought: God perhaps did not really say so, or it perhaps is not really as God has said. And this doubt was after all so thoroughly justified — indeed, redounded to God's honor — as we learned only recently in No. 178. Surely this presupposes an experience which that author had made in his own time, an experience before which the halo dissolves in which the acuity of the nineteenth century also wraps itself, even in a field that, according to apostolic teaching, is commanded not only in its beginning but altogether unto the very end of the sun that shines from heaven. (See Hebrews 11:2 — John 1:5.)

Further, the "Acts of the Apostles" (23:8) mentions a Jewish sect that firmly maintained there was neither angel nor spirit. It consequently denied also the existence of the devil. Of this sect it is related, in passing, that it was not inactive at the crucifixion of Christ: for