# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S83
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Distinction between the Essential and the Non-Essential in Doctrine.   83

"opinion" which the Jena faculty rendered concerning the "Consensus repetitus." We can all the less deny ourselves the pleasure of sharing these citations with our readers too, since they are drawn from works by the persons named that have become rather rare, and indeed from authors who are anything but under suspicion of having exceeded the proper measure in their demands for true orthodoxy.

The first citation is as follows:

"God has entrusted to His Church, as a spiritual mother of all the believing children of God, not merely those chief articles of the true Christian doctrine which every simple believer needs to believe for himself, and without the knowledge and assent of which true faith cannot be kindled or preserved in them, but the whole Christian doctrine of faith and life, as well as the holy sacraments — to keep and preserve the same pure and unadulterated, to defend it against all seducing spirits, to make use of it, to beget and rear spiritual children for God, so that they may grow and increase from day to day in blessed knowledge, to strengthen the weak, to raise up the afflicted, to comfort the fainthearted, to awaken the reckless and the complacent out of the sleep of sin, to set right those in error, to seek the lost, and thus to carry out most carefully everything that it is incumbent upon a spiritual mother to accomplish and do for God's true children on earth; and she has no power to give up anything at all from the doctrines entrusted to her for this purpose, and without recourse to which she cannot fully make use of her commanded office for the edification of her members and of the true children of God — but rather, what Paul says to his Timothy: Take heed unto thyself and unto the doctrine, etc. (1 Tim. 4:16; 6:3ff.; 2 Tim. 3:11; 1:13,14) — that he says, in Timothy, to the whole Christian Church; and what he generally requires of every bishop, that he hold fast the faithful word, that he may be able by sound doctrine to exhort and to convince the gainsayers (Tit. 1:9), that he also requires of all upright bishops and faithful teachers; and this is the office of the Christian Church and of her faithful teachers, that they hold fast and firm, unmoved, not only the articles and points of Christian doctrine which the simple need to believe for themselves, but also whatever is necessary for faithful teachers and preachers to instruct others unto salvation — that which is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, as Paul says in 2 Tim. 3:16 — and let none of it be falsified or withheld."

"Doctrinal matters of this kind, however, comprise most of the controversies contained between our Church and the papal Church, and between our Church and the Reformed or Calvinist Church — such as the controversies concerning justification and the forgiveness of sins, concerning good works and their supposed merit, concerning penance and its partibus, concerning man's