# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1856_S66
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

66             The Obligation to the Church's Confessions, etc.

...foundation of faith. Their calling, [they say,] is the cultivation of free theological scholarship, through which alone true servants fresh in the faith, capable preachers, genuine theologians in general are raised up for the Church as well; to press the obligation to the church's confessions beyond the preservation of the foundation of faith contained in them is, [they say,] the death of free theological scholarship.

The Erlangen Zeitschrift für Protestantismus und Kirche [Journal for Protestantism and Church], which has taken the side of the Preachers' Conference against the Göttingen faculty, published in the March issue of last year a warning to us against our principle that Lutherans interpret Scripture in agreement with their confessions. Under such a principle, so runs the view of that warning — whose author will surely agree with me if I put it thus — there can be, among us, no further development of symbolic knowledge on the basis of Scripture, nor can sound theology exist at all: if you "Missourians" assert the obligation to the church's confessions in such a way that you take their articles of faith also as a rule of faith or rule of scriptural interpretation, then among you it is all over with the freedom of theology, and hence with sound theology, and altogether "the joyful course of things" (of ecclesiastical development) is "held up." This warning cry has not been ringing in our ears only since March: is that not so? The whole great mass of the Lutheran synods and preachers here, and the majority of the Lutheran periodicals, have pronounced the same judgment upon us ever since our synod came into being — seldom, indeed, stressing the supposed danger of unfreedom which threatens our theological work from our principle, but all the more with the assurance that by it we hinder the joyful building up of the Church among us and set ruinous limits to our effectiveness in this land. Who will say that we are not contradicted by many?

The contradiction that meets us — but also the movement in Germany just related — compels us to examine whether the strict obedience with which we desire to fulfill our obligation to the Lutheran confessions will really bring such grievous consequences upon us. Do we not indeed acknowledge the cultivation of free theological scholarship as part of our calling; have we not indeed left our beautiful fatherland solely and only with the intention of helping to build up the Holy Christian Church in the United States? The question whether it is the death of free theological scholarship if the articles of faith of the Lutheran confession are honored and used as a rule of faith shall, with God's gracious help, find its answer in this essay; it is therefore necessary to show that scientific theology is free where theologians, by their obligation to the Evangelical Lutheran confessions, consider themselves bound to teach according to the articles of faith contained in them.

Everyone will grant that scientific-theological work is free