# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S35
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to the 1862 Volume. 35

condemned old heresy. Or are the allegedly more correct new presentations of the doctrines of inspiration, of the person of Christ, of the working of the sacraments, of church and church polity, of the ministry and ordination, of the last things, of the state after death, and so on, anything else? We wish here to let one man speak, in whose publications we have otherwise found with joy not a few golden grains of precious truths — Professor Dr. Kahnis — who nonetheless writes: "Protestantism stands and falls with the principle of the sole authority of Scripture. Independent of this principle, however, is the doctrine of inspiration held by the old dogmatics. To take it up again as it was can happen only through a hardening against the truth.. In the concept of the sacrament, the Word, which forms the substance, is not allowed to come into its full right as the power indwelling the sacraments. This appears especially in the sacrament of the Supper, in which, according to the old Lutheran doctrine, the chief thing is not the body of Christ which it imparts, but the word of the forgiveness of sins, of which the body of Christ is the pledge.. It is this communication of God, constituting the essence of the sacraments, that did not find its full expression in the old-church theory of the verbum visibile. As for the ecumenical doctrines of the Trinity and the God-manhood of Christ, our confession has adopted them, not for the sake of the churchly authority on which they rest, but for the sake of their conformity to Scripture. It is, however, a fact that the Reformers, who on principle placed the center of Christianity in the appropriation of objective salvation, took the dogmas that constitute objective salvation — that is, the Trinity, and the person and work of Christ — from tradition, without deeper scriptural mediation."*) However certain it now is that the Nicene dogma of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian dogma of the personal unity of a divine and a human nature in Christ had the good marks of their age in their favor, still, to a Protestant who might be inclined to find in the historical success these dogmas achieved a divine verdict upon their rightness, the historian of dogma can already reply that in no church father of the first three centuries can a doctrine of the Trinity corresponding to the Nicene formulation be shown, while the Chalcedonian unity of the two natures was long the bone of contention between opposing tendencies. The principle of Protestantism demands, and doubly so in an age which has richer means for understanding Scripture and wider, freer, and deeper spiritual insights than the age of the fathers, a renewed "reproduction" (which might well be taken as a euphemism

*) A proof of how the church of the Reformation related to the true, orthodox church of its past. What God had given to that church, this one accepted as a legacy already entrusted to it, without wishing to compel God — even were it to regard and treat what had been given as not yet given, and were it to walk the same road again, presupposing nothing — to let it arrive at the same, or at some still better or higher, goal. L. u. W.