# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1856_S97
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Jahrgang II.          April 1856.          No. 4.

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

(Continued.)

It is the task of theology to attain a concept of the Christian faith. To
this labor there is indeed a spur from conflict without and within — attacks,
say, on the part of unbelievers or false teachers, one's own doubts; but the
original impulse to it lies in the human spirit itself, given to it by the
Creator, acquired as His own possession by the Redeemer, stirred up and
guided by the Holy Spirit. To be sure, it will always be only individual
members of the Christian Church who possess the gift and impulse for
independent labor in theology, just as, likewise, only certain individuals
receive the gift of prophecy or of public preaching; yet they thereby have
a work to fulfill which is required by the common spirit and serves the
common good. The results and fruits of theological labor that prove
themselves are, like theology itself, the possession of the Church. On the
other hand, Christian theology does not destroy faith, nor does it render it
superfluous; what it has grasped of faith remains faith nonetheless. As all
scholarship seeks the universal, or the essence that subsists beneath
changing forms, so too theology goes beyond the faith of the individual, or
of the individual congregation, onward to faith in its universality — the
faith, that is, of the fellowship of believers, or of the one holy Christian
Church — and seeks in turn, proceeding from that faith, to grasp its
manifold forms in time and among the various persons or congregations. It
sets apart, as it were, the powers, movements, and members of faith — its
content, for instance, and its parts, its ground, its development in history,
its fruits — from one another; it distinguishes them from one another and
investigates their mutual relation and their significance in relation to the
whole; it inquires into the ground of the certainty of faith and puts away
from faith what is not worthy of it; indeed, it even examines the warrant
and the duty of faith to acknowledge the Word of God in Holy Scripture as
its sole, but also as its true, rule. It grasps

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