# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1856_S163
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

163 The Obligation to the Church's Confessions, etc.

...tends to happen. Let no one, then, seek the cause of such mischief in the Evangelical-Lutheran confessions, nor imagine that the experience of the 17th century entitles one to fear that a renewed fidelity to the obligation to those confessions would likewise bring a new bondage upon theology. To be sure, were our theologians to despise or cast away the faith, theology would among them be enslaved — but not through the Evangelical-Lutheran confessions. One may perhaps object that faith comes from preaching, and that if one preaches the dogmas, one does not thereby create faith but merely prepares for theology the bondage of unbelief. But the dogmas, as such, in their strict and rigid form, are by no means to be preached; they are to serve only as the rule of preaching. How, according to this rule, one is to preach the Gospel in the fullness of its sweetness and its comfort, so that hearts are thereby both awakened and built up on the right foundation of doctrine — this we must first learn again ourselves, and can learn it from Dr. Luther as from no one else. Let theology guide its disciples toward this, and it will not lack believing masters and disciples, under whose service it may rejoice in its freedom.

The ecclesiastical life of our time presses theology toward the church's confession, however much many theologians may still resist. It cannot itself be satisfied with the faith grounded on feeling — the first, and by no means contemptible, fruit of the most recent revival; it demands to progress toward the faith that is grounded solely on the Word of God, and therefore seeks a firm structure of wholesome doctrine, such as is erected in the church's confessions. It is now impossible for theology to go on conceiving the dogmas as expressions of Christian feeling, which thus properly have no truth apart from that feeling and whose differences rest only on states of feeling. This view has had to serve to turn attention and respect back toward the dogmas, but were it held to any further, it would estrange theology from the Church, since the latter holds its articles of faith to be true even apart from the hearts of believers, and will hold them so throughout all eternity. Together with all the other spheres of church life, theology too will have to take its stand upon the Word of God, as it has become church doctrine and dogma in agreement with Holy Scripture. Fears have already been voiced that some might yield to this constraint without faith, indeed out of selfish motives. This, to be sure, can no more be avoided than can the membership of mouth-Christians in the Christian congregation; yet other, truly anxious questions arise, and these precisely on our own side, that of the confessors, when it comes not merely to declaring the official obligation as a principle, but to enforcing it upon individual persons. We recall in this connection the ecclesiastical conditions into which our own youth, and that of the persons in question, fell, and consider how it is God's goodness alone that