# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S116
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

116 On the Sacramental Conception of Confirmation.

More frivolously and more superficially, indeed, the dismissal of a dissent from the church could hardly have been managed; and if we are to judge the author leniently in any way, we must assume that the principle in the statement of the Apology, which diametrically contradicts his own, simply never came to his consciousness at all. The very thing which the author asserts of the "sacramental act" of confirmation — that it has a firm scriptural foundation, according to which the pastors can lay on hands by virtue of a prophetic and apostolic word, and that the communication of the Holy Spirit through our laying on of hands, as pastors, takes place as a means "apostolically and quite definitely assigned to us," together with prayer — is precisely what the Apology denies. Confirmation, according to it, does not have God's command and mandate; it is neither instituted nor commanded by God's Word, and carries no attached promise of God. And the Apology says this because it is well aware that all those passages of the New Testament in which the laying on of hands is spoken of do not contain the expressum mandatum Dei and the clara promissio which it requires, both together, for the constituting of a sacramental act. — — — We are done with what we had to say against the sacramental conception of confirmation in the "Pastoral-Theological Papers." We do not conceal that the error into which these Papers have fallen on this one point concerning confirmation (to say nothing of what is taught there about ordination) seemed to us serious and consequential enough to warrant lodging an express and reasoned protest against it. For, held to consciously and carried through, this error involves nothing more and nothing less than a breach with essential principles of the Evangelical Lutheran church. And for this reason we must lament doubly that the "Pastoral-Theological Papers" advance their sacramental conception of confirmation with a self-assurance and decisiveness that stands in the sharpest possible contrast with the instability, obscurity, and confusion of their own arguments. If indeed "the uncertainty and indecision in the conception of confirmation has from the beginning wrought far more harm for the upbuilding of the body of Christ than is commonly assumed," then the "Pastoral-Theological Papers" can, for their part, claim no credit for having averted that harm through their own unfounded discussions, which, for all their self-assurance, remain unsettled and uncertain. And "if indeed the church — the church as a whole — still has something to experience at the point of confirmation," then we wish above all that she might be spared having to experience this: that those who offer themselves to her as helpers should, with the very hands they stretch out for the healing of the church's wounds, rashly and clumsily lay hold of and shake the very foundation of the church."