# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S178
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

178   Doctrinal Proceedings of the 19th General [Synod], or

-diction among the articles of faith is not to be left to reason; otherwise reason would become mistress over Scripture — reason, which is after all in no position to know God's will or God's power. It does not know God's will, because no one has ever seen God, except the only-begotten Son, who is in the Father's bosom; he has declared him, John 1:18. It does not know God's power; for God can do exceeding abundantly above all that we understand, Eph. 3:20. Hence it is our task to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, 2 Cor. 10:5, and to see to it that no one rob us through philosophy, Col. 2:8." (Loc. cit. § 165.)

It is a fundamental error of newer theology to say that theology is a "science" in the sense and concept of the other sciences. Luthardt: "Theology is the churchly science of Christianity. ... In that definition (of the old Lutheran theologians), both the immediate relation of theology to salvation and its conception as a personal quality are indeed meant in the best sense of religious earnestness, but are not scientifically correct." (*Lehre und Wehre*, 1875, p. 162.) Kahnis: "Churchly science is not a means for realizing the practical purposes of the church, but an independent purpose of the church in itself." (Same source.) The most consistent of these theologians was the late Erlangen professor von Hofmann. He stated most plainly of all that, if one wishes to do theology, one must not take up the Bible and draw theology from it, but must instead look within oneself and ask: are you a Christian? — From the fact "I am a Christian" one could then construct the whole of theology. His words run thus: "Theology is a free science only when the very thing that makes the Christian a Christian — his own independent relation to God within himself — makes the theologian a theologian, through scholarly self-knowledge and self-expression; when I, the Christian, am, for myself the theologian, the very own subject matter of my science." (Cited in *Lehre und Wehre*, 1875, p. 163.) — This new theology thus has, quite explicitly, an entirely different theological principle from that of the orthodox Lutheran church. Whereas the latter sets up Holy Scripture alone as the supreme and sole principle of theology, Hofmann, in the passage cited, says literally: "No concepts that have arisen from outside it" (the fact "I am a Christian"), "however they may have arisen, may exert a determining influence on its self-unfolding." We, by contrast, freely confess: we do not want to "develop" the individual articles of doctrine out of one principle, in the sense of newer theology. Our sole principle is Holy Scripture. And here, too, we do not want to start from a single point merely in order to develop everything else from it by reason, but rather we have as many principles as we have clear state-