# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S105
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran Antitheses. 105

...the veil of phrases, and thereby learn that it is not, as with Christ, a plain Yes, but a bare No, or a deceitful Yes-and-No.

35) "Ehrenberg (Proceedings of the Evangelical General Synod at Berlin, p. 301) said, sharply but truly: In order to secure, for the year 1846, the possibility of binding ordinands to the symbolical books, one would have had to command exegesis, in the year 1746: Thus far and no farther!" (Thesis 99). Here we have the unionist formal principle: not in Holy Scripture, which remains the same through all the centuries, but in the commentaries of its expositors since 1746, is the way to salvation revealed; these, then, are the norm, rule, and standard of faith and doctrine. Unionism will doubtless know well enough how it stands with this fundamentum fidei et doctrinae inherited from the rationalists. It would be altogether too inglorious for Mr. Stier, as a "Doctor of Theology," if he had signed Ehrenberg's "sharp" appeal away from Holy Scripture and the Word of God to the pronouncements and human ordinances of the new church fathers since 1746, without having understood it. Against this formal principle of papistry refurbished by Ehrenberg-Stier, I, for my own humble part, renew the protesting thought of the Reformation: "Textus semper manebit, pereat glossa iners."

36) How does evangelical scriptural interpretation before differ from the unevangelical after 1746? The former reads out; the latter reads in. But one can read out of Holy Scripture only what is in it, and read into it only what lies outside it. The old evangelical interpreters cry: Hear God's — ; the new unevangelical ones: Hear our wisdom! The former warn: Hear us only so far as Scripture rightly grants us! — The latter: Beware of Scripture wherever we do not grant it the right! Before 1746 there was an exegesis, an exposition of what Scripture contains; after 1746 there is an eisegesis, which conjures the miserable product of its own genius into the Bible as if by sleight of hand, in order to peddle it more easily under this well-tried brand name.

37) Thus even the enemies must, against their will and without thanks, confess that with the Word of God, which is ever one and the same, was, and will be, one is not able to refute our symbolical books, but only with the glosses that have arisen since 1746 out of a theology grown addled. Can we ask for more?

38) "Are we to maintain, with the utmost folly and presumption, that the faith which appropriates the confessions eclectically is no faith at all?" (Thesis 100). To be sure, it is one — only not the Christian one, but the "eclectic" one; in plain German: the faith of the waverers.

39) Is it admittedly (Thesis 101–105) "Rationalism" (that is, the religion of reason, heathenism) that is the Reformed [faith], and "Catholicism" (that is, as it has always been understood according to the Symb. Apost. et Nic., not that of the Pope or the Turk, of the monks or the men of Wuppertal