# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1864_S341
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Teaching of the Lutheran Church concerning Sunday. 341

and yet it does not for that reason continue in the New Testament; otherwise the new moons would also have to be retained."

Finally, Dr. Christian Aug. Crusius, professor at Leipzig (d. 1775), writes most thoroughly as follows in his "Moraltheologie": "The observance of Sunday primarily, and next to it that of the festival days or days of prayer publicly and lawfully appointed. As far as Sunday is concerned, there is no doubt among Christians that one is bound to keep it, and likewise that the keeping of it must consist in this, that one refrains from one's ordinary work and devotes it to divine worship. But as to the ground of this obligation — whether it is a merely moral one, flowing from the needs of individual persons and of the whole Church, and from the nature of religion, of the love of God and of neighbor, or whether there is a positive divine law for it, namely whether the third commandment, that is, the third clause of the speech from heaven that was heard at the establishment of the covenant at Sinai, binds us to it — on this point opinions are divided even among our own. Luther and his fellow-workers, and his successors in the times immediately following, favored the first view, namely the obligation, lying merely in the moral nature of religion and in the formation and exercise of it according to the divine Word, to keep Sunday and the festival days. Afterward many distinguished a twofold obligation in the third commandment: one which belonged only to the Israelites, and another which is a positive divine law for all times. In the third commandment, one part is supposed to be ceremonial, whose obligation lapses in the New Testament, while another part is a general positive law, belonging to the unalterably binding moral law. The commandment to keep the seventh day, and with the strictness prescribed to the Israelites, is supposed to be the ceremonial element in the third commandment. The general positive law, however, is supposed to consist in this, that one of the seven days of the week is to be kept, for which the apostles appointed not the last but the first day of the week, as the day of Christ's resurrection and of the full dawning of the New Testament. This question must be carefully examined and cautiously decided. The distinction between two commandments in the third clause of the Decalogue — one commanding the seventh day to be kept for a time, the other one day out of seven to be kept forever — cannot be proven. The third commandment deals with the Sabbath, not with one day out of seven, but with the seventh day, as is undeniable from the usage of the language and from the article attached to it. But we are no longer bound to the Sabbath in the New Testament. One should note on this point, first of all, the wholly clear decision of the apostle Paul at Colossians 2:16: Let no one therefore judge you in food or in drink, or with regard to a feast day, or a new moon, or a sabbath, which are a shadow of things to come, but the body is of Christ — that is, in Christ is the substance itself, to which those