# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1857_S288
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

288   Church and Contemporary History.

to be transformed into the Lutheran Church and, after the manner of Romanizing concessions, to be robbed in essentials of her goods and powers. In this respect many superficial advocates of the Union, by not knowing well enough, or not lovingly enough esteeming, the innermost being of the other party or of their own, are more dangerous to the Reformed Church than blunt opponents of the Union. On the other hand, let the notion also be put away that the distinguishing name of the Reformed Church, or certain adiaphora of her worship, or certain theological formulations of her confession, must be held fast for all time merely because they are traditional. — I also see weighty grounds why our church for her part holds fast to the Augsburg Confession, partly because of the excellence and the public significance of this confession, partly because her separation from the Lutheran Church demonstrably never involved a tearing loose from this confession, but contained only a protest against the interpretation of the tenth article on the part of the strict Lutherans. But from this it follows that we may never as a church, as a body of confessors, confess ourselves to the so-called Unaltered Augsburg Confession, even if it be introduced only under the name Confession of 1530; rather we can accept only the Augsburg Confession simply, or else with the express designation of the redaction of 1540. Whoever demands the former of us wishes to seduce us into giving up what we hold to be our calling in the church, namely to testify that the heavenly gift of Christ is never so bound up with the earthly element that receptivity of faith is of no account for the actual reception of it. — It is furthermore necessary and important that alongside the Augsburg Confession the Heidelberg Catechism be acknowledged and named, partly because this is the most general bond of the Reformed congregations in Germany and with other Reformed confessions, partly because only thus can the scriptural and distinctive doctrinal position of the Reformed Church be recognized in a positive way. The Augsburg Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism in their community, agreement, and mutual elucidation form a very beautiful pair of confessions, as has really already been found in several provincial churches, and as has an important historical basis. Whoever will not unite with us on this confessional footing — that is, not whoever will adopt it for himself or for his party, but only whoever will expressly or implicitly leave it to us — with him we cannot unite either in the narrower sense of the word and in the churchly-public sense of an equal obligation of the teachers, while the union in faith in the one Savior and in love subsists very well alongside, and indeed has long been there. — I believe I owe it to the cause and to myself to remark here that the churchly obligation to symbols seems to me to be permissible in no evangelical church in a political-legal sense, since the church as a whole is always more than her symbol, since therefore there can be a limitation, an explanation, an extension of the symbols, and since there must be a scriptural handling of them. Otherwise a servant of the Word might, for example, be compelled to teach the conception of the descent into hell in Question 44 of the Heidelberg Catechism, against which I, for example, should have to protest for conscience' sake toward Christ." —

The Evangelical Alliance. Of it the Halle Volksblatt writes: "As the first ground for the founding of the Alliance it is given that over against Catholicism the unity of the "'evangelicals'" is to be shown. A negative basis, then. But at once there is added as a positive ground that of a "''presentation of the communion of saints.''" The communion of saints is a mystery of God, it is the kingdom which, according to the Lord's word, "''does not come with outward show.''" A presentation of it in oratorical assemblies is in any case a very questionable undertaking; if we had not a distaste for proceeding in such a way, we could call the attention of the promoters — whom we do indeed hold to be sincere people in their fashion — to how near at hand precisely in this the danger of Pharisaism lies. But we have still more against the specifically English manner of carrying out the undertaking. A communion of saints which attaches itself to the world industrial exhibitions and proclaims its "''assemblies of Christians of all lands,''" as at least happened at the Paris one, with a kind of quack-advertising that recalls the revalenta arabica, is not one that particularly appeals to us. . . . Out of the organic fullness of unity of the Christian confession the Alliance has hacked out, after the manner of a modern joint-stock company or of a constitutional charter, 9 articles like chips, which are to form its basis and to which all participants are to confess themselves from the heart. . . . Stated quite soberly, and stripped of all the fine speeches (and in part certainly fine sentiments too) that hang about it, the "''Evangelical Alliance''" is a league of sectarianism against the firm historical forms of the church of Christ. It is — the word is out: a reprehensible undertaking." — So judges a paper which is anything but "Old Lutheran"!

Dr. Credner, well known as a defender of vulgar rationalism, professor at Giessen, died on July 16.