# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1856_S79
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A plea for the Augsburg Confession etc. 79

...communicants is regulated, our Church has, particularly before the celebration of Holy Communion, instituted confession, but expressly declares it to be only a churchly ordinance, and designates absolution as the chief part of it. The minister is permitted to receive the confession of sin from the whole congregation — why not also from individuals, since this would serve greatly for their edification? The prejudice of the people, to be sure, is now directed against this church order, but agreeing with this prejudice does not yet prove that private confession and absolution are contrary to Scripture. Our Augsburg Confession, so Pastor Mann concludes this section, contains in this article too a doctrine that may claim a careful and conscientious examination before it is surrendered to contempt by its own confessors on account of a supposed error.

3. In the third place, the Augsburg Confession is charged with denying that the duty of keeping the Christian Sabbath rests on a divine command. To this Pastor Mann remarks that by this charge the Augsburg Confession is very badly maligned before the whole of Christendom. However, he immediately adds, the authors of the „Grundriß“ had allowed some freedom of opinion on this point, since they had counted it among those articles of doctrine that were to be regarded as non-essential and on which a difference of opinion was to be permitted. From the statements of the Augsburg Confession on the observance of the Sabbath in Article 28, and on the other hand from the treatment of the same subject in the „Grundriß,“ the conclusion is then drawn that the difference between the two by no means consists in the Confession's denying what the „Grundriß“ asserts, namely the obligation of all Christians to a right observance of the Sabbath. The Confession, which in Article 28 does not aim to answer the question of the warrant for the Christian Sunday as against the Jewish Sabbath, declares itself against the tyranny of the bishops, by which they made a matter of compulsion of conscience out of the outward keeping of Sunday together with the devotional exercises connected with it, as though salvation depended on it. Against such compulsion it directs Colossians 2:16-17, and in this it has on its side, in general, all the sayings of the New Testament that treat of Christian liberty, namely also the decisions of the assembly of the apostles and members of the congregation at Jerusalem (Acts 15), and finally also the practice of the ancient Christians, who in the earliest time came together every day for common edification, and only gradually came to observe Sunday, the day of Christ's resurrection, as a special day of edification. This example of the ancient Christians is, to be sure, called by the „Grundriß“ an inspired one, given by God, which therefore contains for us a divine command; but just as surely as the writings of the apostles preserved for us in the New Testament must be held to be inspired, just as surely may we not regard their example as inspired (compare, e.g., Galatians 2:12-13). A