# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1859_S33
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre. [Doctrine and Defense.]

Volume V.    February 1859.    No. 2.

Preface to the 1859 Volume.

(Continuation and Conclusion.)

After a lengthy digression, which we hope has not wearied our esteemed readers or made them impatient, but which they will rather certainly have received with thanks, as a precious pearl from the treasury of our fathers, we now return to our course. —

In theory, at least, all so-called believing theologians of our time would perhaps agree with us on this point: that saving truth is something already fully present, ready at hand, in Scripture, and that therefore neither new revelations of a Montanist Paraclete, or of some so-called inner light of the enthusiasts (Anabaptists, Quakers, the Inspired, Schwenckfeldians, Weigelians, Swedenborgians, and others), nor papist traditions, as the supposed unwritten Word of God, nor finally supplements drawn from the stores of the light of nature and reason, of philosophy, are needed. But now the question arises: Is it also possible that there should be a visible church which already possesses the full saving truth contained in Scripture?

Many in our day deny this possibility, although they concede that the full truth is contained in Scripture. Either they therefore regard Scripture, instead of as a revelation of the truth, merely as an eternal means of exercise in the seeking of truth — as the Sisyphean stone which the Church must roll to the very end; or they hold that the very task set for the Church during the age of the world consists in this: gradually to bring to light the heavenly metal of the full truth out of the dark shaft of the Bible, and that, once this is at last accomplished, the Church will have reached her goal and will then have become that "perfect man," "who is of the measure of the perfect age of Christ" (Ephesians 4:13), and will then celebrate her thousand-year feast of victory.

But just as little as we would have anything to do with the plain, naked skepticism of the former — with that despair of ever finding the truth, which may well befit a heathen Pilate asking "What is truth?" but befits no Christian — just as little can we ever be reconciled with the theory of development held by the latter. It is indeed a hor-