# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1858_S299
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

What Is Now Understood by the Further Development of the Doctrine of the Lutheran Church?     299

nescio. Miraris, quia ego nescio: omnis creatura ignorat." [I do not know. You marvel that I do not know: every creature is ignorant of it.] With that I do not wish to deny that it has always been theology's task, as it was, to meditate upon this mystery. But among all Christologies — from the speculative Christology of pantheism down to every constitutional Christology of believing scholarship — I know none that, for all its impenetrable depths, makes Scripture and the Christian life as intelligible to me as the churchly one does.

In closing now, dearest Professor, allow me to express to you my heartfelt regret that it is against you in particular that I have taken up the pen. How glad I would have been had you been able to write your dogmatics in accordance with the Symbols and the church! It would surely have been a great strengthening for many along with me! This very doctrine, set forth in the churchly sense, would have had to be of uncommon significance for us pastors. Our service is at the altar and in the pulpit, in the schools and at the sickbeds; there we are to make the confession of the church living. How strengthening it would have been for us had we been furthered by you in this so practical a doctrine!

Allow me to open my heart to you a little further than is strictly called for by the occasion of your book. I should like to share with you the grief which, along with me — I know it — many share, that it has now become almost a principle that the doctors of our church, even those whom we otherwise hold in the highest reverence, protest again and again that one must not bind them to the veteres doctores ecclesiae [the ancient teachers of the church]. In free, unbound scholarship they wish to reproduce and reform the doctrine of the church, and in doing so to work the Symbols — after a fashion, taliter qualiter, to be sure — into a component of their own system.*) Statements have been made to such an effect that we find almost more respect for our churchly system of doctrine in Bellarmine and in the great Union of our day than among the teachers of our own church. While in practical life we must labor under heavy struggles on every side that our churchly estate may endure and grow, we must hear again and again from highly honored men of churchly scholarship that this very church we serve has made "confusing" statements, and that the ancient teachers would need only to live today to see "at once" that one may not express oneself as they expressed themselves. That one can teach quite correctly according to Holy Scripture and yet quite falsely according to churchly dogmatics — this has indeed quite recently been set forth for us at considerable length. "For if one is bound to churchly dogmatics,

*) "By the hand of scholarship ('which knows everything and is able to give everything, for it is scholarship and gives scholarship'), rhetorical theology would only too gladly find something new, would gladly make new discoveries, gain new insights, or arrive at the very least at a surveyable systematics. It is the itch of this finding-of-something-new, the itch of these discoveries, by which rhetoric is ceaselessly plagued, and which it can nevertheless never satisfy." (Vilmar, loc. cit., p. 15.)