# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1856_S102
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

were brought about, and that these in turn publicly acknowledged the
dogmas already established by the Church, needs no further discussion
here. The believed Word of God has a history; in the course of time,
under the governance of the Holy Spirit, it becomes dogma; doctrine that
has become dogma continues thenceforth to exist as such in the faith of
the Church.

Dogmas established by the Church may, for a longer time, be attested
merely in the hearts and mouths of the members of the congregation, and
come to be written down only in the private writings of individual
teachers, as, for instance, the Apostles' Creed; but the expansion of the
Church soon made it necessary to set these down in universally valid
writings. These writings are called the confessions of the Church, because
they are testimonies of the Word which lives in the faith of the Christian
Church and is preached among its congregations; they are called symbols,
or symbolic books, because Christians and Christian congregations
recognize one another by them as by a watchword or a standard. They
are in no way to be compared with what on the Roman side is called
tradition. For this latter is supposed to hold as much authority in the
Church as Scripture itself, whereas the confessions of the Church are
subject to the judgment-seat of Scripture; tradition always has something
mysterious about it, since it is supposed to be handed down from bishop
to bishop, from pope to pope, whereas the confessions belong among the
most public works and treasures of the Christian Church — not of the
clergy or of the pope, but of the whole fellowship of Christians — and aim
precisely at giving expression, before all the world, to the faith that is in
the heart; tradition, in the mouth of the pope, demands obedience to
itself from the so-called laity, whereas the confessions are an expression of
the obedience which the whole Church, pastors and members of the
congregation alike, render to Holy Scripture; tradition is supposed to be
able to contain even what is not in Scripture, whereas the content of the
confessions can never differ from Scripture, however much the form,
extent, and shape of the two may differ from one another; tradition,
finally, is supposed to be the rule of the interpretation of Scripture, but
because its content is not subject to the judgment-seat of Holy Scripture,
it is like a crowbar, which opens the lock by destroying it, whereas the
confessions are a rule of faith for the interpretation of Scripture, but like
a key that is fitted to agree with the lock. To be sure, preaching in the
Church, and the exposition of Holy Scripture, follow the confessions —
how could it be otherwise? Holy Scripture is its own interpreter, but in
order that it may interpret itself, every individual passage of it must be
grasped in connection with the sum total of doctrine drawn from all the
relevant sentences and passages within it, and there is accordingly need of
such summaries, or concepts, of scriptural doctrine, in order to establish
the sense which the holy writers intended in their writings. Now the
confessions of the Church consist precisely of dogmas — that is, of
summaries of wholesome doctrine — whose agreement with Scripture
leaps to the eye; and one ought