# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1864_S321
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Doctrine and Defense.

Volume X.    November 1864.    No. 11.

The Doctrine of the Lutheran Church Concerning Sunday.

Several months ago now a tract came into our hands bearing the following
title: "The Anglo-American Sunday. A treatise delivered before the
National Sunday Convention at Saratoga, New York, on August 11,
1863. By Dr. Philip Schaff. Translated from the English into German
by Pastor J. G. Zahner." This treatise is an attempt to justify, by the
most various means of dialectic and rhetoric, the well-known Anglo-American
theory of Sunday. We take this as occasion to lay before our honored
readers, for once, the doctrine of the Lutheran Church concerning Sunday,
and to demonstrate the sound and irrefutable biblical foundation on which
it rests, giving due consideration, as we do so, to what Dr. Schaff, in the
treatise noted above, recalls against it.
It cannot, unfortunately, be denied that the doctrine of the Lutheran
confessional writings, of Luther himself and of his immediate successors,
concerning Sunday, was already, as early as the seventeenth century, not
faithfully preserved by some teachers of our church otherwise incorruptibly
faithful, and was in the time that followed weakened more and more by
ever more of them, indeed positively perverted; so that Val. Ernst Löscher,
though dogmatically and historically incorrect, felt himself moved to write:
"This doctrine was never examined more rigorously and from every side
among the ancients (the Lutheran teachers), but was always treated of it,
as it were, only in passing. Hence exactness on the part of the school is
not to be looked for in their pronouncements. Since, however, the sabbath
question has been so elaborately debated in Belgium, our own people too
have begun to form more distinct conceptions."*) But exactly the opposite
is the case. Given so distinct a doctrine among the theologians

*) This doctrine was never examined more rigorously and at greater length
among the ancients, but was always treated of it, as it were, only in passing.
Hence scholastic rigor is not to be sought in their pronouncements. But since
the sabbath question has been debated in Belgium with such great apparatus,
more distinct conceptions too have begun to be formed among our own people.

See Unschuldige Nachrichten, vol. 1703, p. 399.