# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S120
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

120. New Literature.

only cherish. But if he holds that he must break with the truth of the Lutheran confession, then he no longer has any right to call his dogmatics Lutheran — let alone the Lutheran dogmatics — or to style himself a Lutheran theologian. That is a falsehood, and does not even serve to make the truth clear in the struggle of our day, but only increases the confusion and obscurity, which are, alas, already great enough. Such a falsehood ill befits a man who, as he himself says, wishes to follow truth alone. What is Lutheran in a theologian and his theology does not, after all, cling to his person as some once-for-all imprinted character indelebilis. It is certainly correct that, according to the Lutheran confession, nothing can or may stand fast as an article of faith except what stands fast through God's Word in Holy Scripture. But it is just as certain that only that is Lutheran which stands in agreement with the Lutheran confession. The theologian for whom the Lutheran confession and the content of Holy Scripture come to stand in a relation of opposition to one another has, by that very fact, ceased to be Lutheran. Yet there can be no dispute that the repudiating opposition of Dr. Kahnis strikes at the very innermost confessional substance of the Lutheran confession, when, for example, he rejects the ecumenical confession of the triune being of God under the title of the Athanasian formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, and declares the Lutheran doctrine of the Holy Supper — which, as he says, is taught according to another's "dies diem docet" — to be false, while declaring Zwingli's figurative construal of the words of institution to be justified. The more it becomes customary nowadays to hold fast to the Lutheran name as a churchly title of right, even while striking the truth of the Lutheran confession in the face, the more must protest be lodged against such an abuse of the name and against such untruthfulness."

In what follows, Dieckhoff now demonstrates, tellingly, what a strange "beast" of a system Kahnis has brought to light, in that he wishes to develop everything out of the material principle of justification — out of (not: solely out of) faith — and then to prove what has thus been developed from the formal principle of the sole authority of Scripture;*) so that, in this way, both the so-called material principle of the Reformation — from which he wishes to develop the individual articles of faith, apart from Scripture and confession — and its formal principle, Scripture, which is supposed to be merely a norm and not also a source of faith, take on with him an entirely different, new meaning; in short, how Kahnis "stands neither truly, with his own faith, within the faith of the Lutheran confession,

*) Kahnis says expressly: "As the egg is an undeveloped unity which unfolds into the animal, so the material principle is the unity in which lie the seeds of all the particular differentiations that unfold out of it."