# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1856_S108
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

108 The Obligation to the Ecclesiastical Confessions, etc.

protected from the arbitrariness of the individual, is free where Scripture is allowed to interpret itself, and this happens where the scriptural summaries of doctrine, namely the ecclesiastical dogmas, are used for interpretation. In church history, theology that does not presuppose the faith of the Church gropes about pathlessly, measuring and ordering the facts arbitrarily according to its own thoughts; we, by contrast, have in the faith of the Church the living center around which the historical edifice of the Church freely rises before our eyes, the events of that edifice freely order themselves, and the sectarian formations stand out clearly according to their worth and unworth, without our forming, in our lack of understanding, an unjust judgment. Whence, finally, is practical theology to derive its freedom, if not from the faith of the Church? Its task is to determine scientifically the manner of the churchly activities that aim at the preservation and spread of the faith; it therefore acts only in accordance with its task, that is, freely, when it proceeds from the faith of the Church in doing so. Thus we are

led back again and again to the assertion that it corresponds to the essence of theology, and that its freedom is therefore preserved, when we bring the faith of the Church to its work. We thereby acknowledge, in deed and in truth, the apostles and prophets, the holy Scripture, as the single foundation of our faith and the sole rule of our doctrine and scholarship.

With the obligation to the ecclesiastical confessions, then, the Church demands nothing improper or unreasonable, but only what a right conduct of the preaching office, also on its scholarly side, entails: the preservation of the scriptural faith and the continuation of the edifice of theology as proven from Scripture. The right to require such an obligation of those who seek the churchly preaching office cannot be disputed to the Church, unless one also denies it the right to take confession and promise of fidelity from the one being baptized or from the catechumen. Through this obligation the preacher or teacher impresses

upon his calling to the congregation itself and to scholarship a seal, which reminds him again and again that he is not a servant of his own whims and arbitrary opinions, but of the free Word and faith and of free theological scholarship. Not only is the congregation thereby protected, so far as is humanly possible, from the preaching of arbitrary spirits, but theology itself is thereby also preserved in its position as one of the four free faculties of learning; for these each, in their own way, do not stand in thin air but in the midst of a history whose missteps and follies they must indeed cast off, but whose proven results they cannot cast off without exchanging their freedom for arbitrariness and thereby surrendering themselves. The opinion that, for this protection of both, of the congregation itself and of theology, an obligation to the Bible would suffice, belongs purely to the realm of fancy, for it presupposes that