# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1856_S129
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume II.          May 1856.          No. 5.

(Submitted by Pastor Hoyer.)
The Obligation to the Ecclesiastical Confessions and
Free Theological Scholarship.

(Continued.)

Quite right, one may perhaps say: the faith of the one holy Christian
Church, the fellowship of believers, is not merely a barrier but rather
the indestructible jewel and sanctuary of theological scholarship, with
which it stands and falls; but the confessions you mean, the Lutheran
ones, contain the faith of a particular or separate church — the
Lutheran one specifically — and if you wish to bind the theological
faculties to the confession of a separate church, you rob them of their
standing alongside the other faculties of free scholarship and turn them
into seminaries. My answer to this is, first, that I myself indeed
regard it as an essential characteristic of scholarship to seek, within
the particular individual forms, the universal — thus, in theology, to
seek within the doctrine of the individual ecclesiastical body the faith
of the one holy Christian Church. But, second, I must also maintain that
the particular church is by no means opposed to the one holy Christian
Church, unless it should hold doctrine contrary to Scripture. The one
holy Christian Church on earth — that is, the believers scattered over
the whole face of the earth — is, according to God's will and Word,
never to appear on earth as its own fellowship set apart by external
ordinances, but rather exists within outward Christendom, which is
called church precisely because that Church is within it. It is not the
one holy Christian Church, but outward Christendom, that divides itself
into particular or separate churches, which differ, say, in form,
constitution, mode of doctrine, or even in parts of the content of
doctrine itself. On the other hand, the one holy Christian Church has
sure marks by which one recognizes with the greatest certainty where,
among the separate churches, it is in any case present. It is present
not exclusively, but certainly infallibly, wherever God's Word is
taught purely and the holy Sacraments are rightly administered — a
teaching and administration to which the confessions of Christendom,
and hence of the separate churches, bear witness. Accordingly, none
other than a confession of a particular

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