# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1863_S324
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

324 Some Remarks on a New Apology for the Reformed Church.

—same is hardly credible. So nothing remains but the conjecture that the Licentiate sees this tenderness in the fact that the Lutherans do not wish to have these written documents, which they inherited from the Old Testament church of the time after the prophets, taken away from them, and — so that the people too might have them, read them, and compare them with God's Word — have them bound separately alongside the biblical books. How this, however, can be a reason for Mr. K. why he wishes to be not Lutheran but Reformed is, in fact, scarcely comprehensible to us. He will presumably prefer the great Bible of the Reformed theologian Tossanus to any Lutheran one; but even in that Bible the Apocrypha are found, and indeed with the remark that they were included because it is not useless to read them! It is, to be sure, true that the Synod of Dort already set about removing the Apocrypha from the collection of canonical books, and that it did not dare carry this out solely for fear of the offense it feared from doing so. But what is the anxious concern of the Reformed Church that no human book be bound together with the divine books, when at the same time, as it does, it makes reason the judge over God's Word — when, wherever a word of God contradicts its reason, it reinterprets that word according to the demands of its reason, and smuggles its own human thoughts into the canonical books themselves? What is an outward bending of the knee before the writings inspired by the Holy Spirit, if one's reason and heart will not bend before it? This calls to mind the Jews, who counted every syllable and letter of the sacred text, yet would not let themselves be caught by the words: "The LORD said unto my Lord" [Psalm 110:1]. So, then, let Mr. K. keep his Reformed Bible without the Apocrypha, but with his Zwinglian and Calvinist glosses of reason; we, meanwhile, will remain with our Luther Bible, with the Apocrypha, but without any interpretation by reason, just as it reads.

In what follows, the Licentiate now proceeds to ever weightier grounds for his abhorrence of the Lutheran Church and for his childlike attachment to the Reformed. He writes, namely:

"Roman leaven is the Lutheran numbering of the Ten Commandments, by which it unwarrantably strikes out the second commandment and tears the tenth commandment apart, merely in order to arrive at the number ten. Of this mutilation and disfigurement of God's holy Law our Reformed Church has kept itself free. So too of the un-German, likewise Romanizing, ,Our Father,' and of the exegetically wholly untenable ,deliver us from evil,' which was rejected even by Luther himself in the Large Catechism, in that he understands by the poneros [πονηρός] (?) of Matthew 6:13 the Evil One, the devil."

Marginal remarks: We must confess that we should not have expected such feeble arguments against the Lutheran Church and for the Reformed from a Licentiate of Theology. As is well known, Holy Scripture itself does not say which is the second, which the third commandment, and so on — for the