# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1856_S131
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Obligation to the Ecclesiastical Confessions, etc. 131

be — still less that its accordance with Scripture should be evident at
once to every member of the congregation. Were these alone to constitute
the content of the Book of Concord, it would nowhere contain an
ecclesiastical confession. But in the writings of this book there stands
more than that: a series of articles of faith, or dogmas, comes forth
clearly, and thus a congregational confession stands out, before the
eyes of the reader, from the merely theological discussions — so that
the clarity of the former is in truth not disturbed by the latter. Those
dogmas have from of old alone been held to be the evangelical-Lutheran
congregational confession, for among the members of the
evangelical-Lutheran church in general nothing more was ever required to
be known than the Small Catechism and the Augsburg Confession — those
confessional writings which give a complete presentation of the
ecclesiastical dogmas without adding much theological argumentation. To
the outward garment of the evangelical-Lutheran confession the
theological discussions do indeed belong; they came to be attached to it
not through the theologians' presumption, but in the press of the
struggle for the confession, and will be honored in the church at all
times above other theological works — who, indeed, could read the
Apology without reverence and admiration? But just as the one holy
Christian Church itself values no particular outward garment, so too the
evangelical-Lutheran church values its own — and thus the garment of its
confession — as nothing essential to it, such that it supposed itself to
stand or fall with it. It is her dogmas, according to their doctrinal
content, that she confidently holds up to Christendom as her confession;
and of these she maintains that they are, in deed and truth, ecclesiastical
dogmas — that is, articles of faith whose accordance with Scripture is
evident to the believer at a glance; to these she binds herself not
insofar as they are her own, but because they agree with Scripture and
therefore express the faith of the one holy Christian Church.

Among the dogmas of the Lutheran confession, that concerning the Holy
Supper is in any case the most contested. To be sure, hardly any
believing Christian disputes its verbal agreement with Holy Scripture,
and only when, in the particularly pointed formulations, the well-known
"in, with, and under" — or at least one or two of these prepositions —
is used, does it require explanation that thereby by no means any kind
of spatial union is asserted, but only a real one, namely the
sacramental union, or the union peculiar to the sacrament, of the
visible elements and the invisible gifts of grace (no impanation or
consubstantiation, nor whatever other foolish interpretations
false teachers have devised). But it has been maintained that, for all
its verbal exactness, that agreement was not essential, but only
apparent; that it is indeed rightly taught by the Lutheran confession
that in the sacrament the body and blood of Christ are offered, but that
to call this partaking of the body and blood of Christ an oral or real
one, even if a sacramental one, is false; for the oral