# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1863_S323
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on a New Apology for the Reformed Church. 323

our Church has indeed regarded its confessions only as human "testimonies," but not as testimonies to the errors of earlier times, but rather to the truth — and still regards them so — and because it therefore first puts to whoever wishes to become its servant the question whether he will accept its confessions, not merely insofar as, but because, they agree with God's Word, and administer his office accordingly. But nothing can be more foolish than to accuse our Church of symbol-worship on that account. Were it really symbol-deification to maintain that the doctrine contained in the symbols contains the pure divine truth, then no preacher, without committing idolatry, could say that he had preached to his congregation the pure Word of God. Only a skeptic — one who despairs altogether of finding the pure truth, who is ever learning but never comes to knowledge — can see symbol-worship in the assertion that church confessions contain the plain truth. So then, if Mr. K. has the freedom that he supposedly has in the Reformed Church to depart from its confessions — freedom which he admittedly does not find, with regard to its confessions, in the Lutheran Church — and if he has been repelled by the one and drawn to the other, then the reason why he wishes to be not Lutheran but Reformed lies, among other things, in his own skepticism. Whether this reason for his choice really speaks for, and not rather against, the supposed merit of the church he has chosen, needs, we think, no demonstration.

The other blow that Mr. K. here seeks to deal our Church is a fairly gentle one. He charges it, namely, with only a "certain tenderness toward the Apocrypha." Wherein, indeed, this tenderness is supposed to consist is hard to say. Perhaps in the fact that these books bear, in the Luther Bible, the heading: "Apocrypha, that is, Books which are not held equal to Holy Scripture, and yet are useful and good to read"? Or in the fact that in all Lutheran dogmatics and polemical writings against the Papists it is demonstrated at the greatest length, with many arguments of external and internal criticism, that the Apocrypha do not belong to the canon — indeed, that they contain gross dogmatic and historical errors, contradict themselves, and that therefore no proof for any article of faith can be drawn from them? Or does that "tenderness" perhaps lie in the fact that Luther, because the Papists appealed to the books of the Maccabees for their Mass, granted them this concession: "Although this book of Maccabees is not in the number of Holy Scripture, yet we will for once, for good measure and for the liars' sake, let this text stand as the word of an otherwise pious and holy man, who nevertheless might now and then say something good and true, even though one is not obliged to believe it, since he speaks without Scripture and God's Word?" (Revocation Concerning Purgatory, of the year 1530. See Luther's Works, Erlangen edition, XXXI, 187.) That Mr. K., in this treatment of the Apocrypha, should have discovered a special tenderness toward the—