# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1859_S245
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheran Division of the Ten Commandments. 245

...trod upon its neck — this we have indeed heard at length from the tenth chapter to the thirteenth. Let us further consider what a weight of guilt must have accumulated in those thousand years, that God, merciful and kind, should "thereafter" hide his face so deeply.

(To be continued.)

The Lutheran Division of the Ten Commandments.

Stier published a work last year bearing the following title: "The Ten Commandments in the Catechism." In it he declares it unchristian not to take the prohibition of images as a distinct second commandment, and demands that the commandment to honor one's parents be reckoned to the first table, the table of love toward God, so that each of the two tables is symmetrically assigned five commandments. Ströbel, in the third number of this year's Rudelbach-Guericke Journal, reviews that work of Stier's and states his own conviction on this matter in twenty-three theses, of which we communicate the following to our esteemed readers:

7. The division and arrangement of the Ten Commandments is a free, indifferent matter, in which every church should be left to its traditional custom and practice, without giving offense or causing confusion to weak consciences. The difference over the Decalogue is by no means, as some allege, a point of separation between us and the Calvinists. Were we only first agreed with the latter in the Christian faith and Christian doctrine, we would come to an understanding with them over the form of the catechism within a quarter of an hour. That church fellowship is impossible without uniformity in such indifferent matters is asserted only by those who intend to set up some other lord than Christ over the church. 8) Even if our numbering and division of the commandments had first been introduced by Luther himself, it would still deserve preference over the Philonic-Josephan division, because it harmonizes with the analogy of Scripture unconditionally, and not, like that one, only under certain assumptions. 9) Our form of the Decalogue is falsely traced back by Stier and others to Augustine (cf. Schultz, op. cit., pp. 109, 113). As plain inspection shows, it is throughout identical with the oldest known form — one that, even according to Schultz (and Hupfeld), became customary "soon after the time of Ezra" — the very form marked in the Hebrew Bible at Exodus 20 by the setumot and petuchot. (If Schultz nevertheless wishes to dispute the "priority" of our version on the grounds of the accentuation, which was added much later and was not admitted into the synagogue scrolls, he thereby proves only what no one denies: that a different division of the commandments later found acceptance among Josephus and Philo.) 10) Whoever divides the divine ordinance of Exodus 20:3–5 into two commandments merely as a matter of form, "to make it easier to grasp," him we still count among our own; but whoever also, in substance, separates the "prohibition of images" from the "prohibition of idols"