# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1864_S333
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Doctrine of the Lutheran Church Concerning Sunday. 333

tians are free lords, entitled to set days and times as they wish, or as suits
them. For Christ has made everything free, since he abolished Moses,
without our wanting to let it remain as it now stands, since there is
neither danger, error, sin, nor heresy in it, and without wanting, out of
mere private, individual desire, to change anything for no reason, for the
sake of others who cling with us to such Easters. For we know how to be
saved without Easter and Pentecost, without Sunday and Friday, and
cannot be condemned for the sake of Easter, Pentecost, Sunday, or
Friday, as St. Paul teaches us." (Ibid., XXIV, 275.) *)
Passing over Melanchthon, the drafter of the Augsburg Confession, we
now let a testimony from Brenz follow, who writes as follows, among other
things, in his Latin catechism: "Since, after Christ's coming, the
knowledge of the beginning of the world has been sufficiently confirmed
through the Gospel of Christ, and the promise concerning Christ has
been fulfilled, the Christians are therefore not bound to the observance of
the Mosaic Sabbath. Hence Paul writes to the Colossians, chapter 2: Let
no one, then, make you feel guilty of conscience, etc. The other element
in this commandment is something moral and natural. For nature itself
reminds us that we should preserve within ourselves, and propagate to our
descendants, the knowledge of the God whom we venerate and worship.
The preservation and propagation of the knowledge of God, however,
takes place through the teaching of the Word of God. But in order that
some may teach others the Word of God, a gathering together, and a
fixed time for that gathering, is necessary. Therefore the matter itself
demands that a certain day be appointed, on which people assemble for
teaching and learning the Word of God and for performing the holy acts
instituted by God. It would, however, have been permissible for our
forefathers to retain the Sabbath, but there are good reasons why they did
not recognize the Sabbath as the public and solemn feast day in
Christendom. It would likewise have been permissible to appoint the
second, or third, or fourth, or even the ninth or tenth day for the

*) Löscher, it is true, wants to declare all these unanswerable testimonies of Luther —
that Sunday, and indeed no seventh day of the week at all, is legally ordained by God in
the New Testament to be a holy day — retracted, by appealing to what Luther writes on
Gen. 2:3, pointing out that this commentary was Luther's swan song. But, first, that
portion of the commentary already dates from the year 1536, and therefore cannot
overturn what Luther, as we have cited above, wrote in 1538 and 1539; and second,
Luther himself says expressly in that very passage: "But Moses here remains silent
concerning man, and does not say that the Sabbath was commanded to man." (See
Halle edition, I, 141.) But that is precisely what is at issue — not whether the Sabbath
was kept before Moses, but whether the keeping of it before Moses had been
commanded by a divine commandment. And when Luther writes further on: "Although
man has indeed lost the knowledge of God through sin, God has nevertheless wished the
commandment to hallow the Sabbath to remain in force," etc., Luther is quite clearly
referring there to the church of the Old Covenant.