# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1856_S205
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Whether Such a One Is to Be Held a Heretic or a Dangerous False Teacher, etc. 205

...will venture to pronounce judgment, and so, among other things, to clear a Luther of the suspicion that he passed judgment, out of reprehensible boldness, on the books received into the canon of the New Testament according to mere subjective preference.

It will not be necessary to print Luther's judgments here, since they are found in his prefaces to the New Testament and to the Antilegomena. —

Especially important is the testimony of Martin Chemnitz, the principal co-author of the Formula of Concord. He expresses himself at great length on our question in his Examination of the Decrees of the Council of Trent. We shall therefore let him open the round of our witnesses.

In the Tridentine Council it reads: "But if anyone does not accept these books entire, with all their parts, as they are accustomed to be read in the Catholic Church and are contained in the old Vulgate Latin edition, as sacred and canonical, and knowingly and willingly despises the aforementioned traditions, let him be anathema!" (Session 4, Decree 1.)

On this Martin Chemnitz writes, among other things, the following in his Examen decretorum Concilii Tridentini:

"The third question is: whether the Church of the present day can, with regard to the writings concerning which the earliest Church doubted on account of the disagreement of some — because the testimonies of the primitive Church concerning them did not agree — whether, I say, the Church of the present day can make those writings equal, in canonical and catholic standing, to those which hold the first rank? The Papists not only argue that they can do this, but even in fact assume that authority, inasmuch as they entirely abolish the necessary distinction which the original and earliest Church made between canonical and apocryphal or ecclesiastical books. But it is entirely evident from what we have said that the Church has no such authority in any way, for on the same ground she could also either reject canonical books or canonize spurious ones. For this whole matter depends (as we have said) on certain testimonies of that Church which existed at the time of the Apostles, which testimonies the Church that immediately followed received and preserved through certain and credible histories. Where, therefore, wholly certain documents of the original and earliest Church cannot be produced, according to the testimonies of the ancients who lived not long after the times of the Apostles, that those books which are in controversy were received without contradiction and doubt as legitimate and certain, and were handed down to the Church, there no human decrees avail. For what shameless boldness is it to lay down as a rule: although the original and following earliest Church doubted concerning those books on account of the objection of many churchmen, because there were not sufficiently certain and firm testimonies for their authority — nevertheless, in spite of all this, we resolve that those books, as wholly certain, are to be made of equal authority with those,