# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1863_S341
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Report of the Sixth Ordinary Synodical Assembly of the Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church. 341

connection throughout the whole second chapter to the Colossians clearly shows. So Dr. Calov also explains these passages; indeed, on Colossians 2 he even says: "By ''Sabbaths'' is not to be understood the weekly Sabbath, which was instituted before Moses, even at the creation itself, Genesis 2, but rather other feasts, which were types pointing to Christ and ended with Christ's coming."

Against Clausen's assertion that an apostle's ordinance, custom, or practice has for us a divinely binding force, it was objected that if any one apostolic ordinance or custom were binding, they would all have to be; one wished therefore to go through some such examples, in order to show where such a claim would lead. First, reference was made to Acts 2:45, where we are told that the apostles arranged matters so that the first Christians held all things in common; further, to Acts 15:29, where the synod at Jerusalem required that the Christians abstain from things offered to idols, from blood, from what is strangled, and from fornication. Who now will maintain that Christians of all times are bound to keep all that? As regards the community of goods, we find in 1 Corinthians 11 that the apostles themselves arranged this differently in other congregations, and as regards the eating of blood, the Augsburg Confession indeed says that there is no longer any necessity of abstaining from it, since it no longer gives any offense. Indeed, in 1 Corinthians 7:10 and 12 the apostle expressly declares that there was a commandment which the Lord had given and which he could alter in nothing, but that there were also other matters where he was glad to give his own counsel and opinion, without wishing to bind anyone to it (compare verses 26-28). Further, at James 5:14 and 15 a general command is given which certainly no one now keeps any longer, for not every apostolic ordinance in outward things is binding upon us. Finally, Paul's command to the women was also cited, that they should pray with covered heads, of which the Augsburg Confession likewise expressly says that we are not obligated to it. If we further consider that the apostles were to teach us everything that belongs to salvation, and that Paul in particular boasts that he kept back nothing, how could the apostles have failed to give us a clear and plain instruction concerning Sunday? If Clausen holds, at Romans 14 and Colossians 2, that Paul did not there mean Sunday, it is nevertheless certainly true that Paul was there speaking of the Jewish Sabbaths and feasts, and everyone would necessarily have gathered from his words that one need not otherwise keep any other day either, and the apostle in no way met this thought by saying that Sunday was to be excepted. To the Galatians he speaks quite generally of "days," and when we consider that both congregations, this one and that at Rome, consisted of Jews and Gentiles — the latter of whom previously knew nothing whatever of Jewish days — it would certainly have been necessary to impress Sunday upon them expressly, if the same were a new divine ordinance.

Clausen then attempted, with regard to the examples cited from the Acts of the Apostles,