# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1862_S366
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

366 Is Doctrine or Life More Important for the Well-Being and Salvation of the Church?

-ianismus, of which "Christenthum" [Christianity] is the translation, denote
a doctrine, and although such expressions can, by metonymy, also
comprehend the life demanded by and begotten of the doctrine in
question, they can nevertheless never denote life to the exclusion of
doctrine and in opposition to it, as happens in the propositions of Kahnis.

Still more, however, every Lutheran must be struck by the harsh
contradiction, in the assertion that Christianity is not doctrine but life, that
the Church's chief endeavor must therefore be directed not at doctrine
but at life, in which that assertion stands to the conviction of Luther and
to the goal of the whole German Reformation. For the Reformation did
not, in fact, direct its chief endeavor first of all at life, but at doctrine: it
proceeded first and above all not toward the purification of life in the
Church, but toward the purification of the Church's doctrine, in the firm
certainty that, where doctrine alone is pure, right life too will follow of
itself. So Luther himself declares, on Galatians 5:10, Altenburg edition,
vol. VI, p. 836: "Therefore one must, as I am accustomed often and much
to admonish, diligently separate doctrine from life. Doctrine is heaven, life
is earth: in life there is sin, error, discord, sheer toil and labor; there love
is to overhear and overlook, is to suffer, there the forgiveness of sins is to
govern and rule — so far, however, that one is not to defend such error and
sin; but with doctrine it is a wholly different matter, for it is holy, pure,
unmixed, heavenly, divine. Whoever would alter or falsify it, toward him
neither love nor mercy is to be shown; therefore it needs no forgiveness of
sins either. Therefore it will not do at all to want to compare doctrine and
life with one another: for in a single letter, indeed in a single title of
Scripture, more and greater weight lies than in heaven and earth; therefore
we cannot suffer that anyone should shift it even in the very least. But as
for the defects and faults in life, there we may well be indulgent and
overlook them; for we too are poor human beings who daily stumble and
sin, indeed all the dear saints confess with great earnestness in the Lord's
Prayer that they are sinners and believe in the forgiveness of sin. But our
doctrine is, by God's grace, pure, so that there is no article of our faith for
which we do not have good, firm ground in Holy Scripture: these the devil
would gladly defile and pervert for us. Therefore he attacks us so
maliciously with this argument, which he lays on us through the sectarians'
blame, that we do not keep peace but are quarrelsome and tear apart unity
and love in the Church or in Christendom." Luther thus confesses, with
the utmost decisiveness, that doctrine is higher and more important than
life, and says expressly that the exaltation of life above doctrine comes not
from the Holy Spirit but from the devil. If now Luther's principle is false,
then his whole work, then the whole Lutheran Reformation — which
aimed above all at the purity of doctrine — is not merely without worth,
but even in the highest degree ruinous