# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1864_S339
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Teaching of the Lutheran Church concerning Sunday. 339

Fecht at that time stood among the orthodox theologians as an uncompromising champion of the inner doctrine, so much the greater was the embarrassment into which this work placed not only the Pietists but also the Orthodox. Löscher sought, in the gentlest manner, to move Fecht to a retraction (cf. the Unschuldige Nachrichten, vols. 1703 and 1706), but Fecht, while he did write against Samuel Stryk and Thomasius in Halle, who wanted to throw out the baby with the bathwater and had written not only in defense of Christian liberty on the point of the Sabbath but also against the observance of Sunday itself, nevertheless justified the teaching he had set forth at the same time decisively against Löscher, namely in his preface to Dorscheus's exposition of the four Evangelists and in his Philocalia sacra of 1708. Unfortunately we do not possess Fecht's Schediasmata sacra. We must therefore content ourselves with communicating to our readers the excerpt from the relevant Exercitatio which we find given in the Acta Eruditorum of the year 1688. It runs, in German translation, as follows: "The third of the Exercitationes contains an outline of the doctrine of the Sabbath, repeated from the Augsburg Confession and the remaining symbolical books. Here the author has undertaken to defend: "That the weekly Sabbath of Christians, neither as regards the day nor as regards the rest of the day, can or should in any way be called moral, but is in itself merely an adiaphorous and free rite."" The moral element of the third commandment nevertheless remains, namely that one is obligated, at some time or other, whatever it may be, to assemble for public worship, and therein to teach, learn and praise God and divine things, and thereby to render to God a spiritual worship, and, in order that one may do this, to rest from one's ordinary labors until the service is completed. He holds that this opinion not only agrees best with the third commandment of the Decalogue and its true sense, as it is explained by Luther both in the Small and in the Large Catechism, but has also been taught and defended in harmonious and constant consensus by the great majority of the old teachers of the Lutheran Church. Toward the end of the dissertation he notes finally that this doctrine of the adiaphorous nature of the weekly Sabbath neither mutilates the Decalogue by abolishing a commandment, nor gives offense to the weak, nor opens the way to freedom to work at will on the Sabbath and to its profanation, nor in any way hinders diligence in godliness or diminishes devotion in the observance of festivals." (Loc. cit., p. 504, 505.)

To be sure, Fecht can be regarded as a witness for the originally Lutheran teaching concerning Sunday even into the eighteenth century, since he upheld this teaching until his death in 1716; yet we would also let a few voices from this century speak here as well. Thus, among others, the eminent Leipzig Lutheran theologian and exegete Gottfried Olearius (d. 1716) writes in his excellent Observationes sacrae ad ev. Mat-