# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1855_S229
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Erlangen “Journal for Protestantism and the Church.” 229

“is, by which the more obscure passages are therefore rightly to be weighed.”

We believe that Professor Dr. Kahnis intended the same thing when he wrote in the preface to the current volume of the “Saxon Church and School Gazette”: “According to the principles of the Protestant Church, the congregation calls the clergyman, in whatever form it may choose to do so, on the condition that he interpret the Word of God in accordance with the congregation’s confession.”

It is in this sense, and no other, that we too have written that Lutherans, as such, must interpret Scripture according to their Symbols. By this we mean nothing other than that a teacher within the Lutheran Church, upon assuming his office in it, has, through his oath to the Symbols of this our Church, given the assurance and undertaken the obligation that he will interpret Holy Scripture in accordance with these Symbols—not because he regards the Symbols in themselves as a norm for interpreting Holy Scripture, but because he has become convinced that the doctrinal content found in the Symbols agrees completely with Holy Scripture. In this we admittedly proceed from the assumption that a Lutheran, and especially a Lutheran teacher, has recognized the doctrine contained in our Symbols as the pure, unadulterated doctrine of the divine Word. But we believe there can be no doubt that we are fully entitled to make this assumption. For the Protestant confessors themselves spoke as follows when they presented the Augsburg Confession: “Therefore, in most humble obedience to Your Imperial Majesty, we present and submit the confession of our pastors, preachers, and their doctrine, as well as of our faith, stating what and in what form they preach, teach, uphold, and instruct in our lands, principalities, dominions, cities, and territories on the basis of divine Holy Scripture.” And the Formula of Concord states even more clearly: “What has thus far been said concerning the sum of our Christian doctrine is intended solely to provide a unanimous, certain, and universal form of doctrine to which all our Protestant churches collectively and generally confess, and by and according to which—because it has been drawn from God’s Word—all other writings are to be judged and regulated as to the extent to which they are to be approved and accepted.” In this sense, therefore, all Lutheran teachers have at all times confessed and subscribed to our Symbols. Thus Luther, among others, wrote shortly after the presentation of the Augsburg Confession: “Moreover, we must confess that the doctrine preached and presented at Augsburg is the true and pure Word of God, and that all who believe and adhere to it are children of God and will be saved, whether they believe it already now or are enlightened later; this confession will endure until the end of the world and until the Last—”