# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1860_S259
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A Word on the Bad Habit of Turning Articles of Faith into Open Questions. 259

doctrine, and renounce church fellowship with those who reject this doctrine.

These sentences, stated briefly and in general terms, yield the following: the church alone makes articles of faith. The doctrines of Scripture are, prior to their reception as churchly doctrine into the Symbol, merely theological problems. It is error and sin to hold doctrines of Scripture to be articles of faith before they have been made so by the church.

An open question, then, means such a theological problem as is to be raised by the church to the rank of an article of faith as soon as the members of the church have come to agreement about it.

In the "Correspondence Sheet of the Society for Inner Mission in the Spirit of the Lutheran Church," October and following issues, 1859, in which the doctrines of the church, of the ministerial office, and of the last things are declared to be open questions, Bauer, inspector of the mission institute at Neuendettelsau, expresses himself, in an essay bearing the title "The Dangers Which at Present Threaten the Lutheran Church from Her Own Midst and from Her Most Faithful Friends," among other things as follows: one can speak of orthodoxy only "in all those propositions which have passed through controversy and been symbolically established. Once a point of doctrine becomes disputed, different tendencies, which hitherto went unchallenged side by side, emerge as opposites, each of which wishes to lead the disputed point to a different goal, the one it recognizes as the right one." Of such tendencies within the orthodox church, neither the one nor the other is to be regarded as unhealthy, "for the church must seek to be healed of them as of a sickness"; rather, both are "warranted and necessary," "for were they lacking, the church would be in a state of death"; "without them the church cannot exist at all without being spiritually dead"; "according to God's will they are to move together and work together (even while diverging at the same time!)." — Here, then, much as above: prior to the church's decision, a biblical doctrine is to be regarded neither as true nor as false, indeed not yet as an article of faith at all; the doctrine of Scripture and the contradiction or opposite set against it are, prior to this decision, equally warranted, indeed equally necessary; according to God's will they are to work together to form the article of faith still in the process of becoming, which — since it can be produced only by men, and human knowledge and striving are one-sided — can at last emerge only from the interworking of the opposites, as the fruit of human intellectual activity. Only, this "hovering and eventual coming-to-completion" of articles of faith is conceived by Bauer differently than by Löhe. What comes about in the latter's case, in the course of time, through common seeking and peaceful examination of thesis and antithesis under the invocation and guidance of the Holy Spirit, happens in Bauer's case through a natural