# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1855_S199
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Erlangen “Journal for Protestantism and the Church.” 199.

make no claim to be Lutherans or Lutheran preachers, but rather by those who are unwilling to let anyone deny that they are such. Anyone who is not yet a Lutheran must, of course, first examine the Symbols and naturally cannot sign them as his confession of faith and bind himself to teach according to them until he has attained the clear conviction that they truly contain the “right understanding” of God’s Word. But anyone who wishes to be a Lutheran, indeed a teacher in the Lutheran Church, must already have completed this examination. If such a person complains of coercion and oppression of conscience when he is required to declare that he recognizes the Symbols as being in agreement with Holy Scripture and therefore intends to abide by them in doctrine and confession, this complaint is most peculiar. After all, no one is forced to become a member or preacher of the Lutheran Church; everyone is free to become one or not! Thus, anyone who has voluntarily declared that he belongs to the Lutheran Church, or even that he serves it, takes an oath upon the Symbolical Books that is, as Melanchthon already testified in opposition to an Osiander who wished to remain unbound, nothing more than a public and solemn repetition of the confession of faith that he has already made in practice. If the Church requires such an oath in order to assure itself that the teacher whom it is to appoint understands and interprets Scripture as the Church itself understands and interprets it, then it requires of him nothing more than the public declaration that he has truly and from conviction placed himself beneath its banner and can therefore truly serve it. Nor does it thereby require him to swear that he will always hold this conviction—for who could do that?—but rather that, if he should come to a different conviction, he will admit it and then acknowledge that the authority given to him by the Church, insofar as it was given to him by the Church, has expired. Anyone who declares without reservation, as Pastor Löhe and those who share his views do, that he has found errors in the Symbols which might therefore warrant the quatenus, and who consequently claims the freedom to understand and interpret the Symbols according to Scripture, thereby notifies the Church that he no longer finds in its Symbols the pure understanding and right interpretation of Scripture; rather, that it is compatible with his conscience to recognize the Church’s Symbols as his own only if he is permitted to go back from them to Scripture and, according to Scripture, to understand and interpret the Symbols for himself! What can, what should the Church do in response to such a demand? Should it, can it grant it?—Manifestly, it cannot do so without surrendering itself. It cannot, of course, seek to bind the conscience of such a teacher by an arbitrary decree, but then it can no longer acknowledge him as entirely its own. For where would it lead if the Church, even on a single point, were to allow its members and teachers as such