# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1856_S101
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Obligation to the Church's Confessions, etc. 101

become entrenched and turn into false doctrines; the pure doctrine emerges
more definitely; the goal, the completion of the dogma, is reached, and
with the introduction of this new element,*) the old is confirmed as well.
Thus the Apostles' Creed arose out of reflection on the facts of divine
revelation, as that reflection was prompted, for instance, by the need for
instructing catechumens, and received its definite direction through the
struggle, in part against the Gnostic heresy, which dissolved those facts
into mere shadows and images of human fancies, and in part against the
Ebionites and Nazarenes, who, clinging to the Old Testament law, failed
to recognize the worth of God's redeeming acts. Around this wondrous
work of chaste scholarship and simple faith, this masterpiece of all dogma-
formation, the Church gradually closed and sealed herself off against
Gnostic arbitrariness as against Ebionite legalism. But when she had fully
separated herself from these, and was instead drawn into ever fiercer
struggles with the old Roman-Greek heathenism, which Roman emperors
revived, the question arose generally among her members how the belief
in three persons — God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit —
could stand within Christendom together with the confession of one God.
The scholarly disputes over this question gradually became struggles
within the Church; the proven results of theological labor became
building-blocks for the dogma being striven for; the stubbornly maintained
opinions of erring theologians became false doctrines: when Arius brought
to completion, and sought to raise to church doctrine, the heresy
concerning the Son of God that denied the unity of God, and afterward
Macedonius the heresy concerning the Holy Spirit that abolished the
threeness of the persons, the Church too was then ready, and gathered
her faith concerning the Son of God and the Holy Spirit, in the Niceno-
Constantinopolitan Creed, into the dogmas of God the Son and God the
Holy Spirit. In the ensuing struggle against the powerful Arians, it had, of
course, soon to come to the complete formation of the dogma of the Holy
Trinity, as it is expressed in the Athanasian Creed: namely, that God the
Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, three persons, are one God.
With that a significant advance was achieved beyond the Apostles' Creed,
and yet the latter was not thereby abolished, but rather only confirmed,
and indeed made foundational as to form as well. That, under similar
struggles, the confessions of the Reformation were prepared and brought

*) We cannot forbear remarking here that we cannot subscribe to the manner of speaking,
used here and recurring in what follows, of the "origin" and "formation" of dogmas,
although this has nonetheless not kept us from admitting the submission of our esteemed
contributor, since he himself — not only, as is plain from the essay submitted, wishes
everything he writes to be understood according to the Word of God and the confessions of
our Church, but also since the orthodox understanding of the manner of speaking he has
chosen follows of itself from the context.

The Editors.