# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1864_S144
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

144 Grundtvig.

However many changes Grundtvig may have undergone in particular, and however different his position toward his contemporaries, and especially toward the state church, may have been at different times, some main traits nevertheless emerge in him unchanged from beginning to end. Apart from his national orientation and from the formal principle of freedom of faith and conscience, in which he has always remained consistent, his peculiar understanding of the concepts of baptism, baptismal covenant, and confession of faith appears especially characteristic. The persistence with which he has always held fast to this peculiarity of his recalls the path of all sect-founders, who regularly, starting from a point lying more toward the periphery, seek to move that point into the center of the whole of life and endeavor. We must therefore go into this somewhat more closely.

Grundtvig's "incomparable discovery" (as his followers like to call it) — that neither the free thought of pseudo-Protestantism nor the basic principles of the Protestant church hitherto regarded as unshakeable (the formal principle of Scripture and justification by faith) form the firm foundation of the church, but rather only the apostolic Symbol, traditionally propagated through baptism, as the "living Word of the Lord" — first emerges in 1825, in his dispute with Prof. Clausen, who was at that time still a decided rationalist. The fact of a congregation existing in uninterrupted continuity points back to the Lord as "the one present and salvation-working in his own institutions." The word of Scripture, fixed in the letter, is in itself dead and cannot by itself create life; moreover, it has been misinterpreted and mishandled by the exegesis of unbelieving scholarship. The Reformers did wrong in founding the congregation's faith on the Bible alone; in doing so they set up a new papacy, into possession of which every interpreter of the Bible dares to place himself. Bible and confessional writings can receive their light and their correct understanding only from the living word of tradition. From Christ himself, baptism, the Lord's Supper, the Lord's Prayer, and the Symbol of the church have been handed down — the last of these during the forty days before the ascension — and just as these pieces were delivered to the apostles, so they have passed unchanged through the stream of the ages. The renunciation (of the devil, at baptism) also belongs to this original, living tradition. Only where this is adhered to without the slightest deviation is the baptismal covenant genuine. Where that happens, there is the true congregation; everything else is of subordinate importance.

Without doubt Grundtvig was led to these propositions chiefly by the mishandling of the liturgy, by the arbitrary alterations which the clergy took the liberty of making to it. Yet it is not in the interest of church order that he and his party take offense at these alterations, but because, for him, the salvation of souls, genuine participation in redemption, and membership in the kingdom of God depend on the word-for-word wording. To be sure, things had been made bad enough,