# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1855_S190
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

190 The Relation of Preaching to the Word, etc.

Preaching must bring into the consciousness and life of the present what once happened for its salvation. No interpretation without application, no application without interpretation.

If preaching intends to edify through testimony to the Word, it must presuppose in the congregation a foundation laid by the Word. The congregation is a congregation by virtue of its awareness of the sum total of salvation in the Word of God, that is, a confession. According to the principles of the Evangelical Church, the congregation calls the clergyman, in whatever form it may do so, on the condition that he interpret the Word of God in accordance with the congregation’s confession.*) There is no preacher in the territorial church of Saxony who has not vowed with a solemn oath to preach in accordance with the confession. An Evangelical clergyman must preach confessionally—must do so, we say. For surely no one will wish to dispute that oaths are taken in order to be kept. Every clergyman who still believes in a Judge of the living and the dead must expect to face the question: Did you preach as you swore that you would preach? Then he will not be able to appeal to the multitude of clergymen who treated this oath as nothing; nor to the rationalist professors who told him that the Old Testament was the codex of Hebrew literature and that the New contained the views of the first Christians, that the confession was an antiquity belonging to the history of dogma, and that the essence of Protestantism was religious progress; nor to the rationalist members of the church authorities, who insisted on their own authority while treating all the authorities of the Church as nothing; nor to the interpellations and pronouncements of liberal chambers. Perhaps, in the case of many who swam with the rationalist current at the end of the previous century and in the first decades of this one, one may venture a mitigating word about times of ignorance. Those times are now past. The Word is now preached from the housetops: anyone unwilling to hear it must deliberately evade it. The salt of rationalism has lost its savor in scholarship; scholarship, too, lends wings to the good cause.**) Almost everywhere one now sees the cross of Jesus Christ at the summits of the Lutheran territorial churches. As for what our High Church Government in particular intends, this was shown by last year’s decrees concerning the abolition of rationalist sermon books and

*) If only this principle, now widely acknowledged in Germany, were followed just as widely! But how often does one read in the German newspapers the most splendid confessions of adherence to the Symbols, even from those who, when certain newly prevalent doctrines and views are at issue, readily ignore those same Symbols or openly abandon them! Lehre und Wehre.

**) If only scholarship did not also all too often fly off and away with the “good cause”! Lehre und Wehre.