# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1856_S100
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

labor, may be recognized by everyone. In this form of it, too, it henceforth
belongs to the believed Word of God.

With a certain disfavor, theologians of the most recent time have
regarded the formation of dogmas in the Christian Church, as though faith
thereby lost its original freshness and vitality. But the ground and cause
of this supposed loss can only be human weakness, in which we gladly
misuse our possession of doctrine in order to conceal, under it, the
unbelief of our hearts. The believed Word of God becomes dogma
according to that same divine order which, for instance, has also ordained
that men should not remain in the patriarchal mode of life, however rich
it may always be in the loveliest virtues. The believed Word, which
Christians have inherited from the fathers, they must themselves acquire
in order to possess it; for one can indeed have it, know it by heart, hold it
to be true, and speak of it, without possessing it. To possess it means to
believe it; to acquire it means to be converted to belief in it, and that does
not happen without reflection upon it, without effort to grasp it clearly
and comprehensively, without struggle. Out of these movements, which
are natural to the believing spirit, Christian theology arises, as has already
been shown above; but since the striving after contemplation and
comprehensive view of the believed Word belongs not only to the spirit of
those Christians gifted for theological labor, but to the believing
congregation as such, the results of theology — whatever it attains in the
way of theological concepts, indeed even preliminary work toward such
concepts — pass, little by little, into the knowledge of faith of the whole
congregation. The order in which the individual parts of the believed
Word thus become dogmas is arranged by God Himself, especially
through the struggles into which He leads His Church. False doctrine
from without, and the resulting inner assault within the congregation
itself, drives it to reflect upon the corresponding part of the believed
Word — to theological labor, that is, on the part of those gifted for it, and
to the testing and acceptance of the fruits of that labor on the part of the
whole congregation; the more the false doctrine entrenches itself and even
takes on the shape of dogma, the more precisely and definitely the
Church's dogma takes shape in turn; the moment of decision in the
struggle thus kindled arrives, and then the Church sets up, as its dogma,
the concept of the disputed doctrine — a concept that has matured in the
hands of theology and proven itself by the written Word of God — and
thereby rejects the false doctrine fully and finally. Little by little,
thereafter, the dogma, in its new, definite formulation, enters also into the
knowledge of faith of the individual congregations and members of the
congregation; whole generations, indeed, may pass over it, scholarship
may complete it, grasp it more sharply, ground it more deeply, but it is no
longer set aside. Other struggles, meanwhile, arise; concerning other
doctrinal points differing opinions become vocal, so that the Church, and
within it theology in particular, directs itself to that, a new structure of
doctrine begins, false opinions