# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1859_S309
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Is a Still-Awaited Solemn Conversion of the Jews Taught in Rom. 11:25, 26, 27, etc.? 309

...lack of desire for truth and of zeal to search it out go astray; while others, at various places, even make use of the obscurity of Scripture as a welcome opportunity to twist the divine word willfully; so it happens now and then even to sincere readers and interpreters of Scripture that, out of weakness and carelessness, they stumble over such obscurity as over a stone. But the character of Scripture itself never bears the blame. Its obscurity is not an objective one, but a subjective one. "For, as Quenstedt likewise writes, one must distinguish between the obscurity that lies in the object to be known and the obscurity that lies in the knowing subject. Scripture becomes obscure by mere accident, on account of the incapacity and blindness of the human understanding and the wickedness of heretics and false believers, who add a willful blindness to their natural blindness and, in their malice, close the eyes of their understanding before the so bright radiance of Scripture. 2 Cor. 4:3." (Ib. fol. 171.)

To this is added ignorance of the language, since, as Melanchthon quite rightly writes, "Scripture cannot be understood theologically if it has not first been understood grammatically." Luther, after demonstrating the necessity of a knowledge of languages for the interpretation of Scripture, goes on to say: "For this reason the Sophists have said that Scripture is obscure; they have supposed that God's Word is by nature so dark and speaks so strangely. But they do not see that the whole defect lies in the languages; otherwise nothing would be spoken more plainly than God's Word, if we understood the languages. A Turk must, of course, sound obscure to me, whom yet a seven-year-old Turkish child understands perfectly well, because I do not know the language." (Address to the Town Councilmen, etc., X. 551, 552.) And more still. Christ says: Ἐρευνᾶτε τὰς γραφάς — search, search out the Scriptures, dig in them as in a mine, to find the truth; he does not say merely: Read in Scripture! If Bible-readers and -interpreters fail to do this, it can only too easily happen that they do not draw the sense of Scripture out of it but carry their own sense into it. "The best teacher of Holy Scripture," as Hilary says, "is he who expects the understanding of the sayings more from the sayings themselves than he imports into them, and who carries more out than he brings in, and does not force the sense contained in the sayings to appear as he had presumed, before reading, that it must be contained there."*)

Therefore, however many the causes may be why even sincere readers and interpreters, open to the truth, draw a false understanding from Scripture, the chief cause is that they do not look closely at the very passage of Scripture in question, do not "dig" in it as in a mine. Among the hermeneutical rules to be observed —

*) Optimus ille S. S. lector est, qui dictorum intelligentiam exspectat potius ex dictis, quam importat, et retulerit magis, quam attulerit, neque hoc cogit videri dictis contineri, quod ante lectionem praesumserat intelligendum. [Latin in the original; rendered above: "That reader of Holy Scripture is best who expects the understanding of the sayings from the sayings themselves rather than imports it, and who carries out more than he brought in, and does not force what he had presumed before reading to appear contained in the words."]