# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1864_S32
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

32 Gleanings.

In what followed, the sanctification of Sunday was discussed. The first resolution, the report says — which rejected the divine right of the holy day and accordingly any legal grounding of it — called forth a longer and more lively debate. The proposer of the theses (Pastor Flörke) now defended, although he had in the theses themselves acknowledged a divine right alongside the human one, the sharper wording of his first resolution, and declared the Third Commandment to be purely ceremonial. Consistorial Councillor Dr. Krabbe then set forth in more detail how, since the time of Justin, the Sabbath receded and Sunday advanced in the church, the more the Gentile-Christian tendency gained power; only with the 3rd century, and further in the Roman church, did a Judaizing view again gain more ground, against which the Lutheran church, proceeding from Scripture (Col. 2:16), declares (Aug. Conf. 28) that it is a mere ordinance of the church that the Lord's day be observed, but that such observance is not at all necessary as such ("observationem non necessariam esse" [that its observance is not necessary]). Prof. Dr. Philippi carried this further, pointing to the Small and Large Catechism and to sayings of Luther which "seemed almost too free even to him" (!); Chemnitz still held strictly to this symbolic view. Only with J. Gerhard is a slight bending toward the legalistic to be noticed, whereupon the later dogmaticians represented the divine right more and more; he admitted, moreover, that it is not easy, on this view, to come to terms with the creation account, and wished to remark only that, notwithstanding it, no indication of Sabbath observance is to be found down to the Mosaic legislation; he appealed finally to Col. 2:16 and Rom. 14:5. Although Superintendent Polstorf and others, with a view to the vote on the 1st resolution, still remarked that it was indeed the view of the common man that the sanctification of Sunday is a divine command and the day itself holy, but that we need not shrink from refuting this false view, and that there was no danger of reverence for the Lord's day vanishing — the people would still respect the church's ordinance, the false props being of no worth — nevertheless the majority of the assembly turned to the view of Prof. Dr. Dieckhoff, and the first resolution was not adopted. The chairman therefore now proposed that the difference concerning the divine and the human right of the holy day be left undecided. This is indeed a sorry outcome of a debate among Lutheran theologians.

*

Gleanings.

Just as once, by a miracle, a great multitude of fish was enclosed by means of a torn net (Luke 5:6), so amid the divisions of the heresies the unity of the church is preserved, and men are brought to the harbor of eternal life. (Gerhard, Loc. de eccl. §244.)

It is certainly true that whoever teaches the upright, pure doctrine of God in an upright way, and yet is culpable on account of his life, meets with what Nazianzen so splendidly said: What the one hand gives, the other takes away again. (Luther on Hos. 1:2–3.)