# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1859_S248
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

248 The Lutheran Division of the Ten Commandments.

...to demand the original text in a sense of literal exactness" — strange enough for someone who, shortly before (p. 11), fought so vigorously for the "literalness" of the Ten Commandments, but far stranger still when one examines the tendentious mutilation of the text itself. Why does Stier not give the commandment in full, as, for example, the Heidelberg Catechism does? Because it is meant to carry the sense that one may only make no image or likeness of him who is above in heaven — that it is to be about "images of Jehovah" (pp. 7, 21, and elsewhere) and nothing further. Attached to this is a truly Stier-like little performance. To make the danger of image-worship, which he says threatens even present-day Protestants, plain to that "voice in the Evangelical Church Gazette," he exclaims: "Has this temptation, then, really for the most part ceased under the New Testament? Does the man not know and see the whole Catholic Church? And the Greek Church besides, whose images one German-Protestant princess after another, marrying into Russia, must kiss?" and so forth (op. cit., p. 19). Against such temptations, Stier thinks, only his catechism protects — not Luther's. Does the man not look at the nature of things exactly like someone standing on his head with his legs stretched toward heaven? The concrete facts stand in exactly the opposite relation. The Roman and Greek images of angels and saints do not fall under his second commandment at all; for no one holds them to be "representations of the invisible and incomprehensible divine being," and no one "worships them in place of God." They are meant to represent creatures (Michael, Peter, Mary, etc.), and one serves them only alongside God — which is indeed not forbidden by the second Stier-commandment, but is forbidden by the first Lutheran commandment. Those princesses could quite properly say: "What we do is already permitted by Stier's catechism, which forbids the kissing of images of saints neither in its words nor in its sense, and what is not forbidden is permitted." Stier seems never to have made clear to himself his own relation to the Greek Catholics. He stands with them essentially on the very same ground (the differences concern only incidentals): both he and they think half iconoclastically (for both forbid the making of certain images) and half iconodulically (both fail to forbid the veneration of certain images). Inserting Stier's second commandment would be the deepest debasement of Luther's Catechism. 16) In sum: whoever, in attacking the Evangelical-Lutheran form of the Decalogue, maintains along with the iconoclasts that all the images comprised in the divine command "Do not worship them, and do not serve them!" are equally included in the prohibition "You shall not make them!" — he can at least act in good faith (bona fide), for he has on his side the clear text of the separate prohibition of images. Whoever, on the other hand, says the reverse — that the images exempted from the prohibition of making are also excluded from that of worshipping and serving — acts only in doubtful faith (dubia fide), because it is not the whole prohibition of images but only the close connection between its individual clauses that speaks for him. But whoever gropes about eclectically between these two opposites acts