# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1856_S65
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Jahrgang II.          March 1856.          No. 3.

(Submitted by Pastor Hoyer.)
The Obligation to the Church's Confessions and
Free Theological Scholarship.

Twenty-six years ago now the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung (Hengstenberg's) raised its voice against the arbitrariness with which two professors of the theological faculty at the University of Halle proclaimed their own unbelief to the students in place of the faith of the Church. Two years ago a conference of Evangelical Lutheran pastors in the Hanoverian province of Bremen and Verden turned to the board of curators of the University of Göttingen with the request that provision be made, at the aforementioned university, for the representation of the confession of the territorial church — namely the Evangelical Lutheran — since the theological faculty there taught in favor of the Union, that is, was given over to a manner of teaching that professes to mediate between the Lutheran and Reformed confessions. — What progress is revealed in these two facts! In Halle it is rationalism against which the Church's demand — that orthodox preachers be raised up by the professors — was asserted; in Göttingen the professors are attacked no longer for rationalistic unbelief and the rejection of the foundation of faith, but rather because they do not teach in complete agreement with the Lutheran Confession, to which they are nevertheless bound. The Halle men and their defenders, in their replies, did not acknowledge even the Bible, still less any church confession, as a boundary and measure of their theological activity, whereas the Göttingen men and most of their champions consider themselves bound to teach according to the foundation of faith laid down in the Lutheran confession. Let us thank God that theological scholarship has to this extent placed itself once more in the service of His holy Word! — In one point, to be sure, the Göttingen men still agree with the Halle men: just as the latter appeal to the freedom of theology for their utter arbitrariness in teaching, so the former likewise maintain that they would be forging their theological work into unnatural fetters if they made the boundary and measure of that work the Lutheran confession itself, and thus more than what is laid down therein