# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1856_S98
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

finally, the individual members of the faith, thus examined and proven, one
with another, each according to its mutual relation or connection, into
concepts, and these again into structures of concepts, or systems. But the
faith itself, insofar as it corresponds to the written Word of God, it does
not overturn, even where it can as yet grasp only incomplete, or indeed no,
concepts of some of its parts. The true faith — that is, the faith agreeing
with the written Word of God — remains its boundary; within that
boundary it is free, but going beyond it, it falls into arbitrariness, or,
what is the same thing, it loses its own proper object and gives itself up.

The power that overcomes the world is faith, in that it possesses as its
own God's world-overcoming Word. This significance of the Word of
God — that of being the part in faith which gives it light, power, and life
— is so fully recognized that that very believed Word of God is itself
called "the faith," and thus adorned with the name of its possessor, and
that Christian theology took its beginning from the scholarly treatment of
that same Word (which led to systematic theology, and first of all to
apologetics and polemics). Theology relates to the believed Word,
naturally, in just the same way it relates to faith itself; it seeks the Word
as it stands in the faith of the one holy Christian Church, and it strives,
through its own proper labor of setting forth, grounding, and grasping, to
gather it into a system of doctrine, or system; but it disturbs the Word's
continued existence so little that it rather presupposes it, takes its own
starting point from it, and indeed seeks its goal and end in it.

The believed Word of God does not stand written merely in the hearts
of believers. He who believes with the heart also confesses with the
mouth; besides this, Christians preach and teach God's Word because God
has commissioned them to do so. For this reason the believed Word of
God is, among the members of the Christian congregation, current in
churches and schools through speech, and naturally also through that
means which gives the Word an even wider dissemination than speech
does — through writing. It is called "doctrine" as the object of that
speech and written language. That this doctrine is one and the same in
congregations of the same faith is self-evident, given its origin out of
faith; but it will also demand a common expression through the Word,
since, just as the individual Christian, so too the fellowship of Christians,
who are united in Christ into one body, desires to bear witness of its
faith. Besides this desire, which lies in the faith of the congregation, the
Church is compelled toward a common expression of its faith by the need
to have a universally valid rule for the instruction of its members in the
doctrine it acknowledges — to possess a sign, a watchword as it were, or
symbol, by which it may be recognized both by its own and by those who
seek it; and finally by the necessity of having a universally valid statement
of the right doctrine