# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1859_S102
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

102 On the Language of the Church.

...so-called Corpus doctrinae Julium, printed for the first time, being, as is known, the collection of those symbols which are acknowledged in the Lutheran Church of Brunswick-Lüneburg. After at least seventeen editions of Regius's writing had appeared, Feustking (Wittenberg, 1710) provided a new one. The best is that of Mart. Silvester Grabe, who furnished the book with ample notes and a biography of Regius and published it (Wolfenbüttel, 1714).

Finally, we here append a small catalogue of such ways of speaking as one who would speak with the rightly-believing church must avoid.

Among the unchurchly ways of speaking, some plainly heterodox, others highly liable to misunderstanding and therefore to be avoided, belong among others the following:

Apart from its use, and if the Holy Ghost does not come to it, Holy Scripture is powerless and a dead letter.*) — Whoever is himself unconverted can convert others still less.

God is simple in essence and threefold in persons. — The Father is the Son. — Three are One. — The Father is something other than the Son and the Holy Ghost. — The Father begot the Son by his will. — The Son of God is begotten of the Father in a figurative sense. — Christ's flesh belongs to the essence of the Holy Trinity.**) — The Son is the instrument by which the Father made the world, etc. — In God there is a threefold will.

Whatever happens must therefore happen.

God is, or becomes, accidentally and indirectly the cause of sin.

Satan left the man he had seduced lying half dead†)

*) It by no means suits this manner of speaking that it is said in the Litany: "Give thy Spirit and power unto the Word." For hereby God is not called upon to give the Word its lacking power, but rather the preachers and hearers are, that it may indeed be rightly preached and heard, and so its indwelling power may express itself.
**) An excellent model of the right language of the church regarding the mystery of the Holy Trinity is the Athanasian Creed, of which Luther accordingly writes, on Joel 3:28-29: "Which is so composed that I do not know whether, since the time of the apostles, anything more important or more glorious has been written in the church of the New Testament." VI, 2314.

†) Dr. Heinrich Müller writes concerning the Gospel of the Good Samaritan: "What Christ says here has, in our own day, all but become a mere figure, which is expounded in a parabolic manner of Adam's fall and of justification. Origen made the beginning, Augustine followed in his footsteps, and afterward the whole papacy adopted this gloss. From it comes the error concerning the powers of the free will, which Pelagius also defended. This interpretation is at once contrary to the Savior's purpose; for he speaks here neither, in the words before nor in the words after, of Adam's fall and justification, but of love, and means to show the scribe who his neighbor is. So this explanation, too, runs counter to the rule of faith; for sin has struck us in Adam not half dead, but wholly dead. We are not merely weakened in our powers, but wholly powerless." (See the Herzensspiegel.)