# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1855_S93
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How the Fox Was Lured Out of His Hollow Tree. 93

...pretation of the old orthodox teachers must be understood and interpreted — not the other way around — then indeed they raise a Corybantic clamor; then they cry out against us and say: "There you have it! These Old Lutherans want to bind consciences to human writings, indeed to place them not merely alongside God's Word but even beneath it." Oh, how it stirs then in the camp of the Philistines! Everyone cries: Down, down with these servants of the symbol-idols! — But what is the whole affair? — Nothing but a fine comedy for a thoughtless public. For all who know the matter know quite well that we do not appeal to the symbols over against Scripture, either before our own conscience or before non-Lutherans, but solely before the gentlemen and for the sake of the gentlemen — whom it is not we who first wish to bind to the symbols, but who, in order to have their beloved daily bread in the Lutheran Church, have themselves already, by an oath sworn upon the symbols for the time during which they wish to eat the bread of our Church, bound their own conscience to the symbols.

Yes, yes, gentlemen, go on twisting the status quaestionis; go on making us out, nicely enough, before your uninformed readers to be idolaters of the symbols: it will avail you nothing. In the end it will become plain what is really at issue between us and you. Namely, not whether one may twist, remold, and correct the Bible according to the symbols, but rather: whether he who once swore an oath upon the symbols, in order to furnish the required guarantee as a teacher in the Church, can appeal to Scripture against the symbols; or whether he who believes he must modify the statements of the symbols according to Scripture is not rather obliged to declare honestly that he is no longer a Lutheran and must therefore give up his office in the Lutheran Church. Incidentally, what does it mean to say that the symbols must be interpreted according to Scripture? It means either: that the symbols are absolutely of the same content as Scripture, even where one could not understand them without the help of Scripture, so that one may derive their true sense from Scripture — in which case there would be not only an analogia scripturae, but also a symbolico-scripturaria! Or it means: that since the symbols can also contain error, one must interpret them according to the infallible Scripture in such a way that, instead of the error contained in them, one inserts the biblical truth. — The first, presumably, no one among the quatenus-party will assert, any more than we do; the second, however, is presumably the sense of those critics of the symbols when they assert that the symbols must be interpreted according to Scripture. This latter view, however, we regard as "Lutheran" Jesuitism. The symbols are not to be interpreted according to Scripture, but to be tested by it — yet not only after the oath upon them has been taken, but beforehand.