# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1864_S277
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Christian Catechism; a Guide to Religious Instruction. 277

application which the catechism makes of Gal. 3:28, we cannot give our unqualified assent. It says: "Here there is no Jew, nor Greek" (one may add, in the apostle's sense: no Greek, nor Latin, no Catholic, nor Protestant, no Lutheran, nor Reformed, no Episcopalian, nor Presbyterian, etc.) "here there is no slave, nor free, here there is no man, nor woman; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." If this were meant to express only the truth that the invisible church has its members in every ecclesiastical party where the Word of God remains essentially present, even if it is not preached in entire purity, we would fully agree; we must only fault it for failing to guard, by some qualifying addition, against the misuse of this precious truth in the interest of confessional indifferentism. But if the catechism means to defend this confessional indifferentism itself by the apostle's own words, then we cannot marvel enough at the absurdity of the sense thereby imputed to the apostle. Were the sentence in keeping with the apostle's meaning—that the diversity of the churches does not abolish unity in Christ, that each may remain a Catholic or a Protestant, a Lutheran or Reformed, since they are all nonetheless one in Christ—then, by the same logic, the apostle would also have to be credited with the sense: let the Jew keep his Jewish errors, the Greek his idolatry and his worldly wisdom; both can still be one in Christ. The apostle's meaning can evidently be no other than this: that God wills to save each person, without distinction of his former condition, through the one Christ alone. Far from lending its voice to a confessional indifferentism, this saying proves exactly the opposite, and obligates every Christian to join that church fellowship in which the one Christ and the one way of union with him are taught clearly and truly, and to avoid every other church fellowship. As for the doctrine of the Holy Supper, the catechism gives none other than that of the Heidelberg Catechism, making Christ's body and blood into the grace of the Holy Supper—that is, a means to fear—and defining the partaking of the flesh and blood of Christ as an appropriation of the life-power of his true humanity, both in and outside of the Holy Supper. Finally, we may note the remarkable contradiction in which the catechism entangles itself, in that, while it does separate the other ceremonies regarded by the Roman church as sacraments from the true sacraments, Baptism and the Supper, it nevertheless lays altogether too much emphasis on confirmation. It is said: baptized children need confirmation, and shortly afterward the laying on of hands is presented as a means of blessing and of imparting the gifts of the Holy Spirit; in the very same place an effect of confirmation is spoken of, so that this rite—which is, after all, of merely human institution—is not distinguished sharply enough from the actual sacraments.

There would now remain the third part of the catechism, that on the Decalogue