# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1864_S344
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

344 The Teaching of the Lutheran Church concerning Sunday.

The parts and circumstances of mankind's chief purpose must all together be common to the Old and New Testaments. Certainly, then, creation too is a foundational truth of religion for all times. But the manner of preserving the memory of it by a ceremonial ordinance, of the kind that every commandment of fixed times, places, and customs is, is therefore not yet suited to God's dispensation in the New Testament. This, being the time of the better estate, rather implies that Christians no longer need any ceremonial reminder, as indeed actually holds true among true Christians. Would we not otherwise still be bound not to keep the threshing ox from eating, not to yoke ox and donkey or horse together, not to weave linen and wool together, and the like, because the underlying morality — not to withhold the laborer's wage, not to wish to combine incompatible things in religion and in a conscientious walk of life, etc. — likewise belongs to all times? Now if the reason given were to hold, it would prove too much. For it would follow from it that we would still be bound to the Sabbath, namely precisely to the observance of the seventh day of the week. For the third commandment deals with none other than this day, and this day is also unquestionably the most fitting for the remembrance of creation.... It should further be recalled that the teaching concerning the Sabbath and the observance of Sunday, which I have so far set forth solely according to Scripture and held together with the essential foundational truths of religion, and thus determined with certainty, is the very same teaching that is set forth so clearly and plainly in the symbolical books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church that those of a different mind must for that very reason count these passages themselves among the difficult ones — because they say something other than what, in their opinion, ought to be said, and because they must therefore resort to a forced interpretation of them. See the Augsburg Confession, Article 28 (p. 117 of the Baumgarten German edition, and pp. 42-43 of the Rechenberg edition), and Luther's Large Catechism, on the third commandment (Baumgarten p. 673f.; Rechenberg p. 423, etc.). These passages would say nothing at all against the papacy, as they were meant to, if one twisted them to a different sense. One therefore need not be anxious that one would then be left with only nine commandments in the catechism, for one need only follow Luther, whose catechism is precisely the one in question. We put the observance of Sunday in the place of the third commandment concerning the Sabbath, as its analogue, on account of similar moral grounds, and that Luther meant it so as well is taught by plain evidence. The opinion, grown so common among many, that the third commandment contains two positive laws — one for the Jews, concerning the observance of the Sabbath (Saturday), and a general and permanently abiding one, concerning the observance of one day out of seven — seems to have arisen from a misunderstanding of a quite different division made by Melanchthon, according to which he distinguishes two elements in the third commandment. The one is the part of the moral law, that there should be a public teaching office of the truths of religion,