# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1855_S86
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

86 The Modified Confession to the Symbols.

have we not in thy name," etc. Such a magician is the devil. Wherefore both teachers and hearers do well to ask for the spirit of discernment, so that we may rightly guard ourselves against the false prophets. —

The Modified Confession to the Symbols
as against
the Rationalists and Unionists.

However joyfully and decidedly the confession to the Symbols was at first made by those who in more recent times had come to recognize with horror not only the abyss into which rationalism had led, but had also torn themselves free from the treacherous embraces of the Delilah of our time, the Union — so much has that first holy joy in the precious confession of their church since grown cold again in not a few of them. They had triumphed too soon. When men, asserting the confession over against its enemies but not first immersing themselves in it, undertook a study of Scripture that ignored the already existing development of church doctrine, it came about that, before they themselves noticed it, now this, now that antisymbolical teaching took root in them. When they were at last forced to admit to themselves the contradiction into which they had fallen with the content of the confession, then, instead of either letting themselves be led back to the truth by God's illuminating grace, or confessing their own relapse, they sought to save their conscience by setting up a new theory concerning the binding force of the church's symbols and concerning the obligations undertaken with the oath sworn upon the symbols. They declared, namely, that even a modified confession to the symbols could very well stand together with the fidelity owed to them. Now the faithful sons of our church have, to be sure, never denied that in the symbolical books the essential is to be well distinguished from the nonessential, and that the oath sworn upon them is to be referred not to the latter but to the former. Those faithful children of the church were indeed far from wishing to bind any conscience to what in the symbols is a temporal, human, and therefore imperfect and fragile form. They by no means counted it a matter of true churchly fidelity that every remark and citation given in the symbols that falls within the domain of historical research should be held as historically-critically unassailably established — as, for instance, where an Augustine is cited therein as the author of the Hypognostica, or an Ambrose as the author of the treatise De vocatione gentium, and the like. (Compare Reineccius's notes on Articles 6, 18, and 20 of the