# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1863_S326
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

—us with this, that we Lutherans have in this matter a companion in guilt and a fellow-sufferer in the holy Apostle Paul. We speak here of narrow-mindedness, for even ordinary sobriety ought to have brought Mr. K. to the conviction that a form of the Mosaic commandments framed for New Testament Christians could not possibly retain, for example, the words: "I am the LORD thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage — Nor the stranger that is within thy gates — That thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee." Now if the omission or New Testament reshaping of these words — as Paul, among others, moved by the Holy Spirit, carried out with regard to the last-cited words, Ephesians 6:2-3 — is no "mutilation and disfigurement of the holy Law of God," then neither is the omission of the prohibition of images, in a catechism designed for the elementary school, such a thing; for the prohibition of images, however one may sophisticate against it, is nothing but a supplementary exemplification of the First Commandment, just as is the enumeration of all the persons and animals who, under the Third Commandment, are to do no work, and whom one is not, under the Tenth Commandment, to covet. Even Calvin concedes, as the Reformed Dr. Schaff cites in his new catechism, that the prohibition of images is not absolute, but that images are forbidden in it only insofar as one thereby sins against the First Commandment, namely by committing idolatry with them. Calvin writes, namely, in his exposition of this prohibition of images: "It is not to be understood as though every work of painting and sculpture whatsoever were condemned in these words; we are only forbidden to make images for the purpose of seeking or worshipping God in them, or — which is the same thing — of venerating them to the honor of God, or of misusing them, in whatever manner, for superstition and idolatry."

Yet Mr. Lic. K., in the cited section, gives still a second reason why he would be not Lutheran but Reformed, and this one is — risum teneatis, amici! — a grammatical blunder which the Lutheran Church is supposed to commit daily in her prayer! Namely, because she says not "Our Father," but "Father our"; and this, he says, is in the first place "un-German" and in the second place "Romanizing!" Now we certainly do not wish to claim for the Lutheran Church what Emperor Sigismund vindicated for himself, who, as is well known, when he had committed the solecism of saying "Schismam" at the Council of Constance, and was reminded of it on that account, maintained that, since he had power over all the laws of the empire, he must also have power over grammar. No — to claim any such power for the Lutheran Church would indeed be not merely Romanizing but plainly Roman. Yet to lay oneself open to this very suspicion is, as Mr. Lic. Krummacher's sharply-armed article shows, not a little dangerous for a Lutheran. That evasion, however, should hardly be necessary at all. We hope Mr. Lic. K. will grant that Jacob Grimm is a connoisseur of the German language.*) So it is said

*) A. F. C. Vilmar says in the preface to his German Grammar (2nd ed., Marburg and Leipzig, 1841, p. IV): "That we can learn from Jacob Grimm alone in German grammar, and