# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1858_S36
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

36 "Luther or Arndt!"

ting this charge, in the preface to the first book of True Christianity: "It is the first article, of the justification of faith, that in this book, and especially in the second, is so sharpened and driven so high as was ever possible!" Granted! But instead of this mighty evangelical chief doctrine permeating and governing the whole remaining content of "true Christianity," it stands there uninfluential, isolated, while law and mysticism hold the government; wherefore Neumeister rightly remarks that Arndt says "almost nothing of faith." For just as he has treated the article of justification only episodically, he hurries on again, cheerful as one who has settled an unwelcome task once for all, to his only momentarily interrupted business of driving Moses and Weigel. But does Arndt, then, according to the above citation from the "Lutheraner," wish his entire body of writing to be understood according to the symbolic books? That citation is not the only, nor even the most definite, passage where he demands this. He expresses himself likewise again in the preface to the 4th book, and in the preface to the first book it reads: "I hereby protest that I wish this little book, as in all other articles and points, so also in articulo de libero arbitrio, justificatione peccatoris coram Deo, to be understood in no other way than according to the sense of the librorum symbolicorum Augustanae confessionis, namely the first unaltered Augsburg Confession, the Apology, the Smalcald Articles, both of Luther's Catechisms, and the Formula of Concord." I confess openly that I do not at all understand such a manner of appeal to the symbolic books, which I have never encountered in any of our faith-faithful theologians, and that I rather hold it to be the most ridiculous, yet also the most dangerous, thing — the most ridiculous, because, closely examined, it moves in a circle of collier's faith (I believe what the church's confession believes, and this believes what I believe — but what the confession believes cannot be seen from my words, nor what I believe from the words of the confession; for such is, in fact, the actual relation between the symbolic books and Arndt's books "on true Christianity") — the most dangerous, because it opens the door into the Church for every error; for with equal right as Arndt, the rationalists, unionists, and pantheists too could demand that their writings be understood in accordance with the Augsburg Confession and so forth; would not false doctrine thereby, without recanting a single letter, at one stroke be declared pure and orthodox? I at least cannot convince myself that the doctrinal purity of the symbolic books can represent and substitute for the lacking orthodoxy of the Church's teachers. On the contrary, I believe that such notions must be resisted with all emphasis, particularly in Germany, where an outlook that wishes to be evangelical and Lutheran, but in fact does not rise above Moses and Weigel (or whatever else one may otherwise call that pious-speculative contemplation drawing from the depths or the shallows of its own spirit)