# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1855_S200
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

200 The Erlangen “Journal for Protestantism and the Church”

would permit the exposition given in its confessions to be declared contrary to Scripture and therefore to be corrected from Scripture, even if under the euphemistic title of an interpretation! It would then soon consist entirely of members and teachers, each of whom would declare that on certain points he had to go back to Scripture: one in the doctrine of church and ministry, another in the doctrine of the Sabbath, a third in the doctrine of the last things, a fourth in the doctrine of the Antichrist, a fifth in the doctrine of absolution and confession, a sixth in the doctrine of the person of Christ, and so forth in all articles. And would that appearances did not teach us that, through unfaithfulness to our precious confession, our church has in fact already taken on this lamentable form! Our church itself, however, insofar as we count as belonging to it the faithful confessors of the pure evangelical truth who follow Luther’s example, has never acted according to such principles. When, in the preparation of the Formula of Concord, the issue was also the retention of the Augsburg Confession in its true and proper meaning, our blessed fathers did not declare, in opposition to those who had until then horribly distorted the Augsburg Confession, that they, by contrast, intended to derive its meaning from Scripture; rather, they wrote: “To this same Christian Augsburg Confession, well founded in God’s Word, we hereby confess ourselves once again from the depths of our hearts; we abide by its simple, clear, and pure meaning, as conveyed by the words themselves (quam verba ipsa monstrant), and regard the said Confession as a purely Christian symbol by which, next to God’s Word, true Christians at this time should be recognized . . and it is not our intention, either in these or in other writings, to deviate in the least” (vel transversum, ut ajunt, unguem, that is, by so much as the breadth of a finger) “from the often-mentioned Confession.” (Formula of Concord. Repetition. Introduction.)

The demand that our church should be satisfied with a confession of adherence to the symbols “in the correct scriptural sense” has, moreover, often been made of it; but it has never allowed itself to be satisfied with this, and has always rejected such a confession as one mounted on screws and deceitful. To give only a few proofs of this, we first recall here an opinion that the theological faculty at Wittenberg gave in 1607, at its request, to the Lutheran-minded knighthood in Hessen-Cassel, when Landgrave Wilhelm IV, persuaded by Beza, intended in his purported reformation, among other things, to give a “Princely Assurance concerning the Augsburg Confession, its Apology,” etc., but only “in genere.” The aforementioned Lutheran faculty then replied: “That the praiseworthy knighthood is also unwilling to take this course we consider entirely proper, for it is no secret that much error can be concealed under such generality” (the general and indefinite nature of the acknowledgment of those symbols)