# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1859_S1
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.
Volume V.    January 1859.    No. 1.

Preface to the 1859 Volume.

The Roman church has always maintained, and maintains still, that the
church receives, even with respect to articles of faith and divine
ordinances, ever more light in the course of time. But only a few years
ago we ourselves witnessed how the present Pope declared the doctrine of
the immaculate conception of the blessed Virgin to be an article of faith
de cathedra, while at the same time asserting that this was by no means a
new doctrine, but one only now first revealed to him as such. This latter
pretense was no new figment. Already the Spanish Jesuit Maldonatus, that
famous exegete of the Roman church (d. 1583), who indeed became somewhat
suspect among his own for his denial of the necessity of faith in that
immaculate conception, writes in his commentary on the Gospel of John, on
the words, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear
them now" (John 16:12), as follows:

"From this passage it is clear that Christ did not say everything he
deemed necessary for our salvation, and it is to be believed that the Holy
Spirit did likewise: that he did not reveal everything to the church at
once, because she could not bear everything at the same time, but that as
she grew in age, she also grew in knowledge." It is well known that the
fanatics too, the Anabaptists in particular, dreamed of an ever-new light
that was to dawn upon the church through them and lead her toward the
"perfect age of Christ."

Already Carlstadt maintained, as Luther notes in his exposition of the
first epistle of John (on 1 John 5:1): "not all Scripture has been
revealed."

Similar thoughts, as is only too evident, have now taken hold of most of
the respected theologians even within our Lutheran church.*) They do not
regard it as their calling to bring the doctrine of the church of the past
back into the light and to defend it against the new, pretended wisdom

*) To say nothing of such theologasters as Dr. Benj. Kurtz, who wrote a
few years ago that we are not the children and our old teachers the
fathers, but rather the reverse — that we, with our knowledge now
naturally grown greater, are the fathers, and the old teachers are but
children in comparison to us.

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