# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1859_S308
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

308 Does Romans 11:25, 26, 27 teach a still-to-be-expected solemn, etc.

Epistles of St. Paul, of which he writes: "in which are some things hard to be understood." 2 Peter 3:16.

In letting His holy Word have this character, God without doubt had His holy and wise reasons, which we shall indeed never fully fathom, though some of them lie so open that everyone easily perceives them. Among these certainly belong those to which St. Augustine points when he writes: "The Holy Spirit has arranged the holy Scriptures in a glorious and wholesome manner, so that through the clearer passages he might satisfy hunger, and through the more obscure ones drive away disgust. For scarcely anything is brought forth out of those more obscure passages that is not stated fully intelligibly somewhere else."*) And in another place: "With the clear he feeds, with the obscure he exercises."†)

Quenstedt expresses himself still more fully on this. He writes in his Theologia didactico-polemica: "God has not willed to set forth all and everything in Holy Scripture with equal clarity and plainness, but has willed to teach some things in a more hidden style: 1. so that our diligence in reading Scripture might be aroused; 2. so that disgust and contempt for divine things might be averted (for what is easily investigated is for the most part esteemed worthless); 3. so that human presumption and arrogance might be curbed by the (necessary) effort; 4. so that we might be reminded of the blindness innate in us; 5. so that we might approach the reading of Scripture only with reverence, with a sanctifying of ourselves, and with prayer going before; and 6. finally, so that an all the more ardent longing for the other life and for the academy above might be kindled in us; for when we have perceived, in that which is dark, the imperfection of the knowledge of this life, we strive all the more fervently after that other and blessed life where the perfect shall come and the piecework shall cease, 1 Corinthians 13:10." (Part I, chap. 4, sect. 2, quaest. 12, fol. 178.)

Only too often, alas, it happens, however, that the obscurity of certain passages does not serve the purpose for which heavenly wisdom clothed Scripture with it. Countless teachers and interpreters fall into a false and harmful understanding of many of the more obscure passages of Scripture. Peter himself, when he testifies of the Pauline letters, "in which are some things hard to be understood," adds: "which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest (στρεβλοῦσιν = twist), as they do also the other Scriptures, unto their own destruction." 2 Peter 3:16. But while many who are not open to God's instruction in His Word do so partly out of utter

*) Magnificently and wholesomely has the Holy Spirit so arranged the holy Scriptures that in the plainer passages he might meet hunger, while in the more obscure he might wipe away disdain. For scarcely anything is dug out of those obscure passages that is not found stated most plainly elsewhere. (On Christian Doctrine, book 2, chap. 7.)

†) He feeds with what is plain, he exercises with what is obscure. (Tractate 45 on John 10.)