# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1862_S6
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

6 Theological Axioms.

only to walk once more the same path our old teachers walked, in the sure hope that we should then arrive at the same goal, and achieve the same results? A foolish thought! God does not give everyone everything, nor does he give the same thing at every time. To one servant in the vineyard of the Lord this gift is granted, to another that one; to one age this visitation is allotted, to another that one; "for the selfsame Spirit divideth to every man severally as he will" (1 Cor. 14:7–11). It is therefore vain, indeed a presumption, to wish, as it were, to force God to repeat once more the visitation of grace which he granted to the Church three hundred years ago, simply because men wish to obtain, as the fruit of their own research, the very gifts which God once gave through his chosen instruments — not by receiving them through those instruments, but as though gaining them themselves. Since God, through Luther and his faithful successors, has by grace given the Church again the jewel of pure doctrine, we must now either let this jewel be mediated to us in humility through their service, or else remain forever without this jewel and fall from one error into another. God has made his Church one body, which has not one member but many, whose eye cannot say to the hand, nor its hand to the eye, nor its head to the feet, "I have no need of you!" God has, rather, so ordered his Church that one member always needs another, and so the whole can subsist only through a mutual exchange of gifts.

Strangely enough, Pastor Fengler finds something sectarian in our childlike attachment to our faithful teaching-fathers. Yet that is precisely what belongs to the distinguishing character of a sect: that it breaks with the Church of former times, tears apart its connection with her, despises the mediated preaching office, wishes not to learn but only to teach, to be not a pupil but a mistress, and to help the Church by means of its own new inventions! It makes, not Reformation with Luther, who went back to the ancient Church, but Revolution with Carlstadt and Zwingli.

(To be concluded.)

Theological Axioms.

XIX. On Holy Baptism.*)

1. What God institutes and commands must not be in vain but altogether a precious thing, even though in outward appearance it seem of less worth than a piece of straw. (Luther's Large Catechism.)

2. Baptismus nihil est aliud, quam verbum Dei cum mersione in aquam secundum ipsius institutionem et mandatum. (Smalcald Articles.)

"Baptism is nothing other than God's Word in the water, commanded by his institution."

*) For completeness, compare with this the axioms concerning the sacraments in general that were given in the last number of the previous volume.