# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1856_S107
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Obligation to the Ecclesiastical Confessions, etc. 107

presupposed by theology as true stands opposed to theological work, and only the content of doctrine, together with what has already been established of its expression as necessary and salutary (see Formula of Concord, Art. 4), is no longer subject to the altering hand of theology. It is true that two opinions whose subject matter has attained definiteness in a dogma can no longer stand side by side; the one has thereby ceased to be an opinion, for it has been confirmed and become an article of faith, while the other, if stubbornly held, becomes heresy. Christian theology, for example, can no longer recognize any standing within its field of doctrine for Arian teaching since the Council of Nicaea, nor for Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian teaching since the Augsburg Confession. Yet it is not thereby unfree, no more than the mathematical sciences are unfree, which place a series of principles at the outset without proof. Like a will-o'-the-wisp the spirit wanders about the wide field of theological science when it does not bind itself to the truth already recognized and confessed in the ecclesiastical dogmas. Gottfried Arnold, glowing with love for the Bridegroom of the Church, can nowhere find the Bride herself, only pieces of her jewelry here and there among the impure sectarian formations of Christendom; Semler piles up masses of testimonies to his erudition, but so motley, so frizzled, that one carries away from his writings no other impression than that of a very frizzled and yet very stale wig; we ourselves, who brought to theological study at most a little sentimental Christianity, know how to tell of the helpless arbitrariness with which we gathered theological gems and shards of glass together and threw them away again with one another, until we despaired entirely of our own kind of Christianity. And in this despair — "you plunged from the arbitrariness of feeling into the bondage of dogma!" — so it is cried at us. We did not plunge. I, among others, will thank the late Professor Lücke forever for having led us back to the faith of the Church, and if we advanced beyond his standpoint to the acknowledgment of the whole Lutheran confession, this happened neither out of presumption nor out of ingratitude. But it was not scholarship, rather the preaching of the Word of God, that awakened in us the firm conviction of the truth of the ecclesiastical dogmas, and not through a sudden act of despair, not through a leap to the death, but through long struggles we overcame the rationalistic impressions of our youth and confess ourselves, under great trials, with the fathers of the Reformation. This our confession is nothing servile, for its content is proven by Scripture, the pure truth; but the truth makes free, free also for scholarship. If dogmatics is to raise the knowledge inherent in faith to a system of doctrine, this can be done without arbitrariness, with freedom, only by the theologian whose knowledge of faith is not merely his own but that of the Church itself. Exegesis is