# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1855_S230
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

230 The Erlangen “Journal for Protestantism and the Church”

“is to endure until the [illegible] Day.” (Luther’s Judgment on the Imperial Recess. Opp. Hal. Vol. XVI, p. 1857.) Luther speaks in the same way shortly before his death in the so-called “Wittenberg Reformation” of 1545, signed by him, Bugenhagen, Creuziger, Maior, and Melanchthon.*) It states: “In the year 1530 we presented a confession at Augsburg to His Imperial Majesty, by which, through God’s grace, we still intend to abide, according to its proper meaning and as it is maintained and understood in our churches. For we have no doubt whatever that this doctrine of our churches is assuredly the eternal, one, harmonious doctrine of the true catholic Church of God, given through the prophets, Christ, and the apostles, and that it accords with the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, with the ancient holy councils, and with the understanding of the first pure churches. Therefore, for the glory of God and proper invocation, for the salvation of many people, and for the planting and strengthening of true faith and proper invocation among our descendants, we also consider it necessary that the understanding of that doctrine which we confess and teach in our churches, confession, and catechism should be preached and maintained unanimously in all churches.” (Ibid., Vol. XVII, p. 1324.) That later generations, too, confessed the symbols in this sense and swore to them with joyful confidence of faith requires no proof.

Here we merely repeat what Rudelbach states in the work already cited above: “The formula of subscription must express or contain the identity of the Christian confession with revealed truth; otherwise it is null and void, and the entire proceeding is worse than child’s play, for serious matters are at stake here—the dearest, eternal treasures. In other words: The symbols must be accepted not insofar as, but because they agree with Holy Scripture. Not merely the Church, but the very nature of the Christian confession, which cannot waver between Yes and No, demands this most emphatically. The ancient Church designated that identity simply by the word pistis; and the Evangelical Church, pointing simultaneously to the source and the derivation, commonly uses this or an equivalent formula, by which the person being bound promises ‘steadfastly to remain with the pure doctrine and the Christian confession, as these are founded in the Holy Apostolic and Prophetic Scriptures, contained in the first, unaltered Augsburg Confession, and repeated in the other symbolic writings of our Church.’ The presupposed identity could hardly be expressed more clearly, fully, or appropriately.” (Ibid., pp. 225–226.)

May and must one now assume that the teacher who is within

*) Who, as is well known, drafted it.