# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1863_S342
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

the examples cited, to answer, contending of most of them that they had only a temporary, not a general, significance, since they arose quickly and, in part, on the apostle's own arrangement, came into use, and took place only in individual congregations, as they also, he said, had special occasions for arising, occasions not found everywhere and at all times. When the apostle once says, at 1 Corinthians 7, "I, not the Lord," he (Clausen) meant that this addition shows that where it does not stand, the apostle always spoke in the Lord's name. On the passage in James he remarked that the substance of the command had only been that one should pray over the sick; the added command, to anoint them with oil, occurs, moreover, only at this one place of Scripture and could therefore not be regarded as so binding.

It was then first pointed out how Clausen had begun, from the creation onward, to find a passage in holy Scripture which would prove that Sunday was imposed upon us by God, but had been unable to find any. Later he had rested on the position that it was an apostolic ordinance and had been in use among the first Christians; but how little that obligates us had been sufficiently proven to him by several examples, and then, in his wretched attempt to answer this, he had in the end arrived at the assertion that a single passage of holy Scripture is not enough to prove the truth of a proposition. If a Christian and teacher in the Church could make such an assertion, it was found no longer consonant with the dignity of a Christian synod to negotiate with such a person, and an explanation must first be demanded of him, whether it was really his heart's conviction to say so dreadful a thing as he had said. It was further pointed out that Clausen had expressly acknowledged that Sunday is not commanded to us Christians, that he had derived it not from any word of God but from the custom and practice of the apostles, and that he had then had the wicked audacity to call it false doctrine that one should not recognize everything the apostles had practiced as a divine ordinance for us. Besides the examples already cited above in rebuttal, one wished now to adduce only one more, namely something Christ himself did — the washing of feet — which surely no one, except the pope, would make into a commandment for us. To wish to bind ourselves to the example and practice of Christ and the apostles in this way would mean nothing other than submitting oneself to the dominion of the pope; and to say that something which one recognizes for oneself is not commanded in God's Word is nevertheless a divine ordinance, is a mockery of God.

Against Clausen's argument from Mark 2:27 it was urged that, if it were to have any meaning at all, Christ must necessarily have been speaking of the Sabbath that existed before Moses, since Clausen wished to transfer to us only this Sabbath, not the one instituted through Moses. Now, however, it is at the very least very