# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1860_S260
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

process, through natural necessity. When the tendencies of spirits striving toward opposite goals within the orthodox church are brought into contact, and the forward movement and the backward movement collide, the general law of action and reaction, under which all life stands, becomes operative; each of the tendencies then goes to its most extreme point, exhausting all the possibilities of error to the right and to the left, until at last they have exhausted themselves and broken apart; then the spirit turns back and settles down peacefully in the blessed middle of truth — and the article of faith is complete. In this unceasing generation of articles of faith consists the spiritual life of the orthodox church.

The Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Iowa has likewise declared the doctrines of the church, of the ministerial office, and of the last things to be open questions.* To recognize the sense in which this church body understands the expression "open question," the following passage, taken from the latest number of its "Kirchenblatt" (July 1860), will suffice: "It is not the Iowa tendency that they preach chiliasm and nothing but chiliasm, but rather that they hold that both the doctrine of the last things and the doctrine of the church and of the preaching office are open questions — such questions as one may, within the church, quite well hold different opinions about. For that very reason they wish also to live in good peace with the various other tendencies within the Lutheran Church. Now a pastor who agrees with the synod in this view and on this principle can be received into it, even if he should not share the views that do admittedly prevail in the synod on those disputed points of doctrine. It goes without saying that he must conduct himself peaceably toward these views and must not, accordingly, denounce and combat them as heresies, as is unfortunately done nowadays by so many."

Here too we have the same sense of the expression as above. There is, in the doctrines over which a controversy arises within the orthodox church, no divine word in which the correct knowledge and doctrine is contained and by which the controversy would be decided; there is here no false doctrine by which the name of God could be profaned. Falsehood and truth are, by right, entirely equal to one another within the orthodox church; light and darkness must be maintained in peaceful fellowship, no doubt for the reason that no one can know what is falsehood, what is truth, what is light, what is darkness, what is divine revelation, and what is the pernicious seed of the devil — until the church has made that theological problem, which before was permitted to count only as an "opinion," into correct or false doctrine, into an article of faith.

* The Ohio Synod has done the same with regard to the first two of these.