# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1856_S162
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

162 The Obligation to the Ecclesiastical Confessions, etc.

—especially the Formula of Concord was compelled to set forth the Lutheran dogmas, provided a strong stimulus for later theology to make of the otherwise one-sidedly pursued dogmatic labor an exercise of the understanding and of acumen, and thus to carry on a kind of game with the doctrine of the Church, under which theological life in the end simply dies out; but it was the presumptuous understanding that misused the sharpness of dogmatic formulation as a stimulus; the form of our confession is as little to blame for that as the form of the Church is to blame for the fact that unbelief hides behind it. Thousands upon thousands of wonderfully glorious hymns were sung in the seventeenth century as in the sixteenth by poets who, like Paul Gerhardt, confessed the Lutheran dogmas in the fullest sharpness — indeed these hymns are themselves in turn confessions of that very faith, and thus arose not in spite of it but out of it. Rich and inspired devotional books in considerable number were composed by theologians of the seventeenth century, who, like, among others, Johann Arnd, gladly expressed their full assent to the Book of Concord, and derived the attacks of their opponents by no means from these men's zeal for the Lutheran confession. Theology became one-sided, lifeless, and unfree, the more the faith vanished from the circles of theologians and educated men — in short, from the leaders in Church and State — and withdrew among those portions of the people standing farther from scholarship; but it was the fault of the faith itself when the very lords of the Protestant government of state and church degraded it into a means for the carrying-out of political and other self-seeking designs, and thereby put it on a level with the basest passions — greed, hatred, envy, malicious joy — the clever exploitation of which was held to be the essence of statecraft. This wicked manner of governing, which one may well call the Machiavellian, proceeded from the Roman Catholic side and was bravely resisted by the Protestants at the time of the Reformation, yet was nevertheless gradually adopted by them too, in accordance with that maxim of experience, that the combatant learns from his opponent. It shows itself on the Protestant side for the first time with alarming clarity in the conduct of Maurice of Saxony, and achieves in the Thirty Years' War so complete a victory that it no longer remained merely a principle of government, but passed over also into the mentality and habit of thought of the leading portions of the people — an evil that was furthered by the fact that, under the incessant distress of that iron age, men's minds turned away from all higher and more spiritual goods and were directed toward the satisfaction of immediate and pressing needs. Given a way of thinking such as this, which values faith not for its own sake but for its usefulness toward some outward end, it was inevitable that in the seventeenth century faith itself should be lost, that the articles of faith should become laws of faith, to which obedience was, where possible, compelled with the help of the temporal sword, and that theology, which had lost life along with faith, should be transformed in the end into a method of treating these laws of faith, much as is done in law books with temporal laws