# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1856_S77
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A plea for the Augsburg Confession etc.             77

...men-pleasing or fear that Luther ever allowed to guide him in all his teaching and confessing. Every article of faith, with him, proceeded out of a careful examination of the evangelical Word, and he defended the faith of the Church not merely with the weapons of theological scholarship, but also out of a heart full of faith, so that one must say the Lutheran Reformation was no work of the study, but of the prayer-closet, of prayer, of a deeply inward experience of faith — no mere reformation of theology, but of religion and piety. This those who wished to take the field against the supposed errors of the Augsburg Confession ought to consider, and not appeal to a few preachers in the "American Lutheran Church" who perhaps did not believe those doctrines that the "Outline" designates as errors. Nor should one appeal to the enlightened spirit of our age, which has recognized these doctrines as errors. The Church and its preaching must not be made dependent on the spirit of the age; that it has made great progress in many sciences is no proof at all of its competence to judge in matters of faith; least of all is anything of that kind to be entrusted to the spirit of the present age, which, for all its worldly enlightenment, has very little understanding of religious things. To be sure, the Lutheran Church, like other particular churches, cherishes certain doctrines peculiar to itself, but it is precisely in regard to doctrine that God has granted it excellent gifts, and these it must cultivate, not throw away, as has, alas, often happened, merely to please other church bodies. One cannot give it the Bible alone as its confession of faith, because Christendom does not begin only today, but has a history, and therefore also a historical structure of doctrine, which one may not simply leap over. If someone does not agree in every point with this structure of doctrine, he does not on that account demand for his own opinion the same respect that is owed to the faith of the Church, nor does he for that reason seek to alter a structure that he himself did not erect. The opponents pretend to be securing a wider spread for the Lutheran Church through the revision of the Augsburg Confession; but this expansion, however desirable in itself, must not take place at the expense of its doctrine, for it is not the name, not flesh and blood, that makes us true Lutherans, but Lutheran doctrine, and with the Augsburg Confession we would be shaking the very foundation stone of our Church. To be sure, the Augsburg Confession must again and again be tested most strictly against Holy Scripture, for this is the rock on which that foundation stone of our Church is laid; but this gives the authors of the Outline no permission to alter the confession, as though their conviction of its partial incorrectness were raised above all possibility of error. Scholarship is subject to the greatest changes — theology too, which, for example, fifty years ago in Germany was dominated by rationalism, but now is returning to the old confessions of faith, the more that minds turn again to the old faith. Many doctrines,