# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1864_S334
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

334 The Doctrine of the Lutheran Church Concerning Sunday.

public feast day.*) For Christ has given his church no commandments
concerning particular feast days, but has rather called it to freedom, only
that it should not abuse that freedom to the neglect of God's Word and
to license of the flesh. In keeping with this freedom, therefore, our
forefathers judged it good to appoint the day next after the Sabbath,
which is called the Lord's Day, and some other days, as feast days. Now
since these days have been adopted as solemn feast days by the public
consent of the church and fixed by public laws, we therefore rightly
understand, in this (Third) Commandment, under the name of the
Sabbath, the Lord's Day and some other feast days, which are celebrated
not for the confirmation of idolatry, but for the knowledge of truly godly
doctrine." (See Catechismus, pia et utili explicatione illustratus. Author,
Johannes Brentius. 1551. 4to, pp. 485, 486.)
So writes Martin Chemnitz in his Examen Concilii Tridentini: "One
does not read that the apostles imposed the observance of this day (of
Sunday) upon the consciences of the New Testament by any law or
commandment, with the intent that it be necessary; rather, the
observance was a free one, for the sake of order. For if we are freed
from the elements which were divinely instituted and commanded in the
Old Testament, how should we be bound by human decrees? Col. 2:20.
For also, in another case, Paul says: I have no commandment of the
Lord, but I give my own judgment. 1 Cor. 7:25.**) . . . It is well known
that the earliest church, in the times after the apostles, held its
ecclesiastical assemblies on the Lord's Day . . . That this observance was
a free one is not obscurely concluded from the fact that, besides the
Lord's Day, they also held church gatherings on the fourth and sixth
days, as Epiphanius writes, for hearing the Word, for the use of the
sacraments, and for common prayers." (Part IV, loc. 5, de diebus festis.)
Further, the same Chemnitz writes in his Loci Theologici: "Because
God, at the beginning of the world, long before the Law of Moses,
hallowed the seventh day, the observance of it seems not to be merely
ceremonial. This objection has greatly troubled Burgensis, and he
struggles with it in various ways. First he says that the hallowing in Gen.
2 concerns only that one day on which God rested after completing the
works of creation. But the words of the Decalogue relate that hallowing

*) It would also have been permissible to appoint the second, or the third, or the
fourth, or even the ninth or the tenth day as the public feast day.
**) Nor are the apostles read to have imposed, by any law or by any precept of
theirs, the observance of that day upon consciences in the New Testament with the
notion of necessity; rather the observance was free. For if we are freed from the
elements which had been divinely instituted and commanded in the Old Testament,
how should we be bound by human decrees? Col. 2:20. For also in another case
Paul says: I have no commandment of the Lord, but I give my counsel. 1 Cor.
7:25.