# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1856_S99
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Obligation to the Church's Confessions, etc. 99

to set against false teachers and false doctrine. Holy Scripture cannot
serve the Church as such an expression of its faith, for Scripture is itself
the rule of its faith. The believed Word is only God's Word when it
agrees with Holy Scripture; it has the testimony of the Holy Spirit for
itself insofar as it corresponds to Holy Scripture; but on that account
alone it is not yet the Scripture-word itself. It always contains only so
much of God's revelation in Christ as the Church has already grasped
with the knowledge of faith, whereas Holy Scripture presents all the
history and doctrine through which God has revealed Himself in Christ,
and is itself, moreover, because it arose through the special inspiration of
the Holy Spirit, a part of that very revelation. It grows in extent the
deeper the Church falls into the struggles of the last time before the end,
whereas Holy Scripture is complete, indeed so fully closed, that until the
last day no addition to it may be expected. It is the edifice of doctrine
which the Church, in this last age of the world, in which salvation in
Christ is held out for acceptance, erects upon the foundation of the
apostles and prophets, whereas Holy Scripture itself supplies the
foundation of the apostles and prophets, having been raised up in the first
age of the world, when God was preparing salvation in Christ. As for its
form, finally, the discourse of Holy Scripture is shaped like all simple
historical narrative in general, and like all teaching discourse that arises,
in accordance with whatever need the hearers happen to have, out of
momentary inspiration or prompting, whereas the believed Word, by
contrast, has and strives after the form of the churchly article of faith, or
dogma.

A glance at such articles of faith — say, at that of the Holy Trinity —
suffices to show us, on the one hand, the asserted distinction between the
believed and the written Word of God, and, on the other, the nature and
character of a churchly dogma. Various, yet interrelated, doctrinal
elements are there gathered together and comprehended in a single
proposition; in the dogma of the Holy Trinity, for instance, the doctrine of
God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, together with the
doctrine of the one God. One sees the careful and painstaking labor with
which those individual doctrinal elements were set forth separately,
examined as to their mutual relation to one another, and finally joined
together accordingly. The agreement of the proposition of faith thus
obtained with Holy Scripture leaps at once to the eye, even though it does
not itself, in this particular form of it, stand in Holy Scripture, and its
parts or members are not always to be found there precisely as individual
utterances, but rather correspond, in general, to the sense and content of
all the relevant discourses and narratives of the Bible. In short, the
churchly dogma is unmistakably the result and goal of theological labor, a
theological concept that scholarship has attained. But it is more than
that. The Church has, in its time, taken it over out of scholarly
knowledge into the knowledge of faith, and thus into its doctrine, since
the agreement of the same with the written Word, without a scholarly