# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1856_S161
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Jahrgang II.          June 1856.          No. 6.
(Submitted by Pastor Hoyer.)

The Obligation to the Ecclesiastical Confessions and
Free Theological Scholarship.

(Continuation and Conclusion.)

Christian theology does not destroy its own freedom, but rather establishes it, in that it presupposes the doctrinal content of the dogmas of the Lutheran confession and carries on its work in agreement with the same. It need shrink neither from the obligation itself to our confession, nor from the full carrying-out of the same. That it has of late lost in arbitrariness and gained in freedom, the more its disciples have brought the faith of the Church with them into their scholarly work, we may now assert as a fact of experience. It will, to be sure, be objected to me, as a consequence of fidelity to that obligation, that theology was unfree in the seventeenth century, and particularly in the second half of it. But to hold our evangelical-Lutheran confession responsible for that would be just as unjust as if one wished to lay upon the Reformation the blame for the dissolute, licentious life on whose account Luther once left Wittenberg in 1545. It is true that the extraordinary development of doctrine in the age of the Reformation gave occasion for theology in the seventeenth century to confine itself more and more one-sidedly to the working-out of the dogmas and to neglect its other branches, especially the exposition of Scripture; but that development of doctrine could not help it that human weakness was unable to master it. It is true that the theology of that time, under its incessant struggles over church doctrine, succumbed more and more to the temptation that assails combatants in every doctrinal controversy, namely, of confusing the possession of doctrine in the understanding with the possession of the same in faith, and thereby leaving faith itself untended; yet this temptation does not spring from the doctrine over which one contends, but from the perversity of the human heart, which strives, given a good opportunity, to rid itself of faith itself, while nevertheless retaining the doctrine of faith to cover its own nakedness before itself and before others. This much, too, is not to be denied: that the exceedingly sharp and strict form, in which

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