# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1859_S207
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On Bible-Sermons.                                                      207

more edifying, [and had taken it upon himself] to prefer to preach
Epistles rather than Gospels, doctrine rather than history, the New
rather than the Old Testament, self-selectively Christian rather than
definitely churchly — was it not, then, quite natural, once yet more
kinds of wind of doctrine began to blow, to throw, if not all at once,
at least the last quarter of Holy Scripture after the first three, the
Epistles after the Gospels, the New Testament after the Old, doctrine
after the histories, Christianity after churchliness?"

The church services set aside for the exposition of the Bible were, the
longer this went on, applied to it less and less, and because in them
people only ever kept hearing the strawy doctrine of faith and morals
preached by Rationalism — with which they were already fed to the point
of disgust in the main services — attendance at such services declined
more and more, until they were finally discontinued altogether. So it
has stood in most places down to recent times, when here and there
people have again begun to return to the old, well-tried way of
expository preaching.

What, then, should stir and drive us also to hold Bible-sermons
diligently? Above all, the Third Commandment of God and all the
scriptural passages belonging to it, namely those which press for an
understanding of God's Word and for obedience to it; further, the many
precious promises for such students of it, for example Joshua 1:8,
Psalm 1, etc. Next to this, the example of the Church of God from the
very beginning; for how diligently must the first human beings and
their believing descendants have pondered the first promise of Christ,
which was also the only one for 1,600 years! And what rich exposition
took place, especially in the earliest times of the New Testament, as
well as in the time of the Reformation and still in the 17th century,
has been spoken of in what precedes.

To this is added the great need that should drive us to it; for when
prophecy fails, the people become wild and unruly, Proverbs 29:18. This
we see with horror in the people who stem from the age of Rationalism.
The little that they still learned there of individual stories and
sayings relates for the most part only to moral teaching, not to the
doctrine of faith; it was and remained a mere feat of memory, of which
one did not know what to do with it. Besides, the little knowledge they
had was so leavened through and through with the sourdough of false
doctrine that both understanding and application were almost entirely
perverted. They also absorbed a mass of prejudices against the
divinity of the Bible altogether, so that even people who later, for
years, heard the pure preaching of God's Word, would still let slip
blasphemous talk against it — for example, that the Bible was made by
men and that not everything in the Bible is true, and the like. Of the
Old Testament it was always said that it belonged only to the Jews,
not to Christians; and even with regard to the New Testament, what was
literally worth knowing was so restricted that it could have been
reduced to a few pages, for it was taught that most of it concerned
only the people living at that time. It goes without saying that from
such