# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1863_S327
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on a New Apology for the Reformed Church. 327

but rather in "Jacob Grimm's Grammar of the High German Language of Our Time. Adapted for Schools and Private Instruction by J. Eiselein, Professor, Belle-Vue near Constance. 1843," p. 351: "The form Vater unser [Father our] is no Graecism, but genuine German idiom, like der Bruoder sin [the brother his]; diu niftel min [the niece mine]; frouwe min [lady mine], etc." Mr. K., even should he refuse to let Jacob Grimm count with him as a higher authority, would nonetheless, as it seems, have to submit to the latter's own proofs. So much, then, is certain: if Mr. K. has become not Lutheran but Reformed out of concern that he would then have to speak "un-German" with the dear God, he may now set his mind at rest on this weighty point. But should it still stand in his way that saying "Vater unser" is something "Romanizing," then we know no other counsel than that he should pray the Lord's Prayer in Greek; this would then relieve him of all danger of offending either against his Reformed orthodoxy or against the syntax of genuine German.

Now when, in this section, Mr. Lic. K. finally also adduces this as a reason why he would be not Lutheran but Reformed — namely, that the Reformed Church has "kept itself free" from the Lutheran but "exegetically wholly untenable: 'deliver us from evil,'" — we cannot, in the first place, conceal our astonishment that Mr. K. thereby makes it a condition of his joining a church that the same church have adopted not only nothing dogmatically untenable (in which we would agree with him), but also nothing exegetically untenable concerning the sense of a passage of Scripture. This is something quite unheard-of, inasmuch as, until now, orthodox Christians have demanded with Paul no more than that "prophecy be according to the analogy of faith."*) It is likewise nothing but a bold, empty assertion when Mr. K. says that the Lutheran translation, and the interpretation likewise contained in it, is exegetically untenable. Or with what does our worthy antagonist propose to prove this? Does he suppose that Luther's interpretation in this case involves a Greek solecism, as with "Vater unser" it involves a German one? There he would err just as thoroughly as in the other case. What hermeneutical principle, then, would there otherwise be, by virtue of which Luther's translation should prove untenable? We suspect that Mr. K. holds the Reformed division of the Lord's Prayer into six petitions — in which the sixth and seventh petitions are taken as one petition (just as the ninth and tenth commandments are taken as one commandment) —

—in German grammar can be learned from Jacob Grimm alone, this I wish to impress earnestly upon the heart not only of all teachers, but also of the pupils of the gymnasia, especially in an age in which lack of mastery is the order of the day, and everyone would rather think with his own half-formed thoughts than with the whole thoughts of a master." The words emphasized here are underlined by Vilmar himself.

*) We have indeed also seen, in the September issue, that Mr. K., in contradiction to his present assertion, does not himself agree with the exegesis of his own Reformed symbol, the Heidelberg Catechism, which, according to Question 71, expounds Titus 3:5 as referring to Baptism.