# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S123
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

What the Apostles Say and What Christ the Lord Says to Our Catechism Controversy. 123

5. If the complaining party claims the right to call into doubt, or indeed to give up, doctrines that are not specifically Lutheran articles of faith but belong to the fundamental tenets acknowledged by all confessions, that is more than if someone regarded the oath of homage as a privilege to emancipate himself from all the laws of his fatherland.

6. That a catechism having Dr. Luther for its author, and an exposition held in his spirit, should displease Consistorial Councillor Schenkel in Heidelberg can surprise no one. For the Baden territorial church has long been without a confession and so little Lutheran that our fellow believers in Baden have quite recently been persecuted in an outrageous manner. The man shares to a high degree the hostile disposition of that church, and, among other things — as the writer of this has himself heard from a credible mouth in Baden — occasionally reviles the precious servant of God, our Luther, for his faithfulness to every jot of the word of Christ.

7. Since Christ's kingdom is not of this world, no one should wonder if the faith should lie prostrate in a land for as much as fifty years at a stretch. Over the struggles that arise because it is Christ's way to awaken again from death, one must contend either with God or with the causes that have brought on so heavy and dangerous a sleep. But the watchmen of Zion are bound to no tradition, not even to that of inherited routine, but have the express command of a Lord who does not let himself be mocked, and each is to see to it for himself that he stands before him and does not fall.

8. Whoever wishes to be saved has good need to let his reason be taken captive by him who has the might and the power to do it, and to obey the word through which that same Lord does indeed — convert our soul.

9. Even to the "scribes" the Bible remains a sealed book, until they, like Luther, simply receive as newborn children what God gives them and every unlearned reader in the Bible. The "key," therefore, is not to be despised which this servant of God found and has preserved for us in the Catechism. Holy Scripture is indeed a heaven that does not first receive its light from him who beholds it with eyes opened and practiced in the contemplation of its wonders; rather, its sun is "faith" (in the objective sense), the rule of all prophecy (see Rom. 12:7). That a sufficiently accredited priest of the truth — and no age will take this title from the Nightingale of Wittenberg — can and may set down in a brief confession, in writing, and thereby also help others to insight into the coherence of revelation. That Luther has in this way, down to the present day, rendered the service of a doorkeeper to many souls needs no proof. Many a one, by contrast, cannot enter the sanctuary, because false interpretation and preaching on the part of those bar it, to whom God has likewise entrusted, each in his own place, the "key of knowledge" (see Luke 11:52)!