# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1855_S225
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Teaching and Defense. 225

Volume I. August 1855. No. 8.

The Erlangen “Journal for Protestantism and the Church.”

(Conclusion.)

The second point in our Synod’s reply to the Fürth Conference that offended the author of the article from the Erlangen journal published in the previous issue is this: “Lutherans as such must interpret Scripture according to their confessional writings.”

That Lutherans should take offense at this declaration is indeed strange to us. We can explain this objection only by supposing that the reviewer understood that proposition—which faithful Lutherans have so often advanced and which is already expressed by the very existence of the confessional writings in the Church—in a sense that was and remains foreign to the members of our Synod, as it is to all other orthodox Lutherans.

First of all, that proposition is certainly not intended to mean that a Lutheran (a Lutheran teacher) is bound to regard the interpretation of a biblical passage found in the confessional writings as corresponding perfectly to the meaning of the Holy Spirit in that particular passage. As we know very well, our Lutheran Church has never bound its teachers to its confessional writings in this sense. Thus, for example, the indisputably orthodox and pure theologian J. Conr. Dannhauer writes in his Liber conscientiae apertus: “The confessions of faith also belong here as norms, namely, as normed (derived) norms, just as the town clock is the norm for the civil activities in a city, while itself being regulated by the circuit of the heavens. Although such confessions may not bind one to uphold every circumstance, form of expression, line of argument” (and thus also every interpretation of Scripture), “and citation, the substance of the doctrine must nevertheless be upheld as it has been set down in writing, and not merely insofar as it may appear to private judgment to agree with Scripture; for in that manner one could also subscribe to the Koran.”*) And this

*) The confessions of faith also belong here as norms, namely, as normed norms, just as the town clock is the norm for civil activities in a city, while itself being regulated by the circuit