# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1864_S279
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A Church Event. 279

politics had made them forget theology. But this time they felt called upon to involve themselves once more in theological discussions, and so, on the occasion of "the removal of Mr. Coquerel," as they call that measure, they undertook to instruct Protestantism about its fundamental principle, which, according to them, runs thus: Every pastor has the right to teach what he pleases, and remains nonetheless a good Protestant pastor, since within Protestantism there can be no talk of any definite doctrine, and hence none of orthodoxy or right belief.

This is not the place to demonstrate the lawfulness of that measure with respect to Mr. Coquerel. It has already been sufficiently shown that the Reformed consistory acted fully within its right. We wish only to call our dear readers' attention to the utterly perverse view which unbelievers and rationalists nowadays seek to spread about Protestantism. Protestantism is simply not a sample-card of all sorts of possible religious opinions; it is not the religion of free inquiry and of "infinite progress." Protestantism is the religion of obedience: namely, that man, with his reason and his conscience, bows beneath the authority of the revealed Word. Protestantism does not first go seeking the truth—it possesses it in the Word of God, and how it has grasped this Word in faith it has set down, for all time, in its confessional writings, as a testimony binding on congregations and clergy alike. In this, Protestantism protests solely against such doctrines and ordinances as are contrary to the Word of God. Whoever does not agree with these confessions is perfectly free to found a new church or religion, but he ceases to be a member of that particular Protestant church.

It has been held against the Schifflein Christi that it has placed itself under a definite confession, under the Augsburg Confession. But the affair of Mr. Athanase Coquerel the younger shows once again how a church can abandon such a confession only to its own greatest harm. The Reformed Church of France no longer possesses a confession—and yet it is the wish of many of its believing members to put an end to the dreadful state of division from which it suffers for want of a definite confession. We hope in God that the measure taken by the Paris consistory will prove a blessing in this regard. It is, after all, once again a confessional act: a confession of the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, which among all other doctrines of salvation is today chiefly contradicted. And for this the Lord has promised a blessing, where He says: "Whoever confesses me before men, him will I also confess before my heavenly Father." And so we hope that the Reformed Church will increasingly come to recognize what a necessary and salutary thing it is to gather around a confession that agrees with the Word of God.