# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1864_S274
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

274 Christian Catechism; a Guide to Religious Instruction.

should always say of a tyrannical civil authority: God forbid that I should lay my hand upon it; its outrages the righteous heavenly Judge will punish in due time, and its godless commands I will neither carry out nor help to execute; but in everything that can be done without sin, I will obey it, for despite all its tyranny it still is and remains the civil authority set over me by God, to whom I owe subjection not merely for the sake of punishment, but even more for conscience's sake.

(Submitted by Pastor G. Löber.)

Christian Catechism; a Guide to Religious Instruction in School and Home, by Philip Schaff, Doctor and Professor of Theology. (Conclusion.)

Although all the chief parts of Christian doctrine are, in general, of equal importance, insofar as a person must know and believe them for salvation, the Apostles' Creed is nevertheless the center and the sun, to which the rays of all the other parts are both traced back and from which they proceed. It is of all the greater importance, therefore, that this confession remain pure and unaltered for a Christian. All the more must the repeated distortion of Christian doctrine, which is likewise found in the exposition of this second part, cause offense. The introductory question, "What is faith?", leads one to expect a definition of the word "faith," but is anything but such a definition. For when the answer runs: "The living communion of the soul with Christ, through which we become partakers of his life and of all his benefits," it leaves the pupil altogether in the dark about the nature of faith—indeed gives him a wholly mistaken notion of it—since the catechism confuses faith with the consequence and effect of faith. Further, when the catechism thinks to improve upon the word "hell" in the second article by the expression "realm of the dead," it does indeed make of Christ's descent into hell something quite different from what the symbolic doctrine of both the Lutheran and the Reformed church holds it to be. On the third article, the catechism accuses Luther of having wrongly altered the word "catholic" into "Christian." How groundless this charge against Luther is has already been shown by B. Carpzov in his Isagoge in libr. symb. Luther, he writes, substituted "Christian" for "catholic" in his German translation of this Creed, following the example of the ancient German church, which, as Chemnitz reports, also gave this article, even before Luther's time, in this form: "I believe a holy Christian Church." Equally irrelevant, indeed unwarranted, is it that, instead of the usual translation of the Greek σάρξ (flesh), "resurrection of the body" is substituted; for what the catechism adduces as the reason for this—that flesh and blood in the grossly material sense shall not inherit the kingdom of God—is in fact far too weak to serve as a reason