# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1863_S325
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on a New Apology for the Reformed Church. 325

The signs which are taken in the Hebrew text of Exodus 20 for this purpose do not agree with those employed in Deuteronomy 5. The manner of numbering is therefore quite plainly an archaeological adiaphoron. Our Church regards it as such. She therefore lets it pass that the Reformed Church numbers them differently than she herself does, without wishing to make this a heresy on the former's part; but she also retains the traditional numbering, without letting herself be troubled that this is made, by the rabbinical wisdom of the Messrs. Calvinists, into a soul-destroying error. She maintains her Christian liberty in this matter all the more gladly, the more important a model she has for it in the holy Apostles, who likewise are not so much concerned with establishing the correct numbering of the commandments as with showing their true spiritual sense and the Christian's freedom from the Law; for, as is well known, the Apostles, in Christian liberty, when they cite the commandments, follow not only quite a different numbering and order for Christians than Moses used for the Jews (cf. Romans 13:9), and that indeed after Christ's own example, who likewise orders the commandments quite differently than Moses does (Luke 18:20; Matthew 19:18-19), but they even alter the Mosaic text itself and give it a New Testament form (Ephesians 6:2-3; cf. Exodus 20:12) — quite apart from the fact that Moses himself, already in Deuteronomy, had reshaped his own text according to the need of a later time. In sum, the difference that exists, as regards both the numbering of the holy Ten Commandments and the form of the text of the same for catechetical purposes, between our Church and the Reformed Church, consists in this: that our Church proceeds here in a New Testament, Christian manner, while the Reformed proceeds in an Old Testament, Jewish manner; that our Church here makes use of her Christian liberty and, just as she claims it for herself, so she also allows it to others, whereas the Reformed Church would deny to the Lutheran Church the liberty that she claims for herself, without being able to bring the historical correctness of her own manner of numbering to any evidence. To call our manner of numbering "Roman leaven" can, it seems, have its ground only in this: that the Reverend Licentiate takes the African Church Father Augustine — who, according to the Reformed themselves, is supposed to be the father of our manner of numbering — for a Roman pope.*) What weighty reasons, moreover, speak for the Augustinian division of the commandments is of course not for present marginal remarks to discuss, nor is the historical correctness of that division, as against the Ambrosian and Hieronymian ones, the actual status controversiae here. But when our Reformed apologist speaks here of "mutilation and disfigurement of the holy Law of God," we can — pardon the expression — excuse this only as a Calvinistic narrow-mindedness, and console

*) That our numbering, moreover, was already in use before Augustine is attested by Origen, who, after citing the first and second commandments as reckoned by the Reformed, adds: "Haec omnia simul nonnulli putant esse unum mandatum" — that is, this whole group some hold to be a single commandment. Homily 8 on Exodus.