# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1859_S100
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

100 On the Language of the Church.

...and by meaning one thing. These two things easily preserve unity in life and in faith. In common life already nothing is more hated than a double-tongued man, who thinks one thing and says another; but in faith nothing is more ruinous than a sectarian who has his own peculiar opinions and ways of speaking, only so that it may seem he has discovered something new. In this way a wide window is very easily opened to divisions and factions. Let us therefore preserve concord in our ways of speaking and our opinions, in our endeavors and our customs, so we shall easily remain free of the guilt of division. Those who bear one name from the name of Christ may also be one, teach one thing, and confess one thing."*) (See Balduin's Commentary on the Epistles of Paul, p. 282, 288.)

Similar remarks are attached by Calov in his Biblia illustrata to the passage 1 Corinthians 1:10. He writes: "To exclude every division here, the apostle admonishes them to hold to one manner of speech, for commonly he who invents new words also begets new articles of faith at the same time. Therefore new ways of speaking and new formulas are also to be avoided, both so that no controversies, disagreements, and divisions arise, and so that no new articles of faith are introduced. On the contrary, it is holy and unshakeable, according to 2 Timothy 1:18, to hold to the pattern of sound words, both as regards those contained in Holy Scripture and as regards the ways of speaking that explain the same, which are received in the church and serve to exclude heterodox opinions, and which set forth and preserve the true sense of Scripture — such as: consubstantiality, the incarnation (ἐνσάρκωσις), the personal union, the communication of attributes, and similar ways of speaking that are customary in the church and confirmed by the symbols of public confessions."

For a rightly-believing and instructed Lutheran, all this is beyond question. A chief purpose why our church obligates her teachers to her common confessions of faith is indeed this: that these confessions thereby give her assurance that they not only believe what is confessed in them, but also that they teach it, and will deviate from it neither in sense nor in manner of speech. The first subscribers of the Formula of Concord therefore expressly testify that from the divine truth which they had once "acknowledged and confessed, as it is grounded in the prophetic and apostolic Scripture and is further comprised in the three Creeds, and also in the Augsburg Confession, delivered in the year 1530 to the Emperor Charles V, in the Apology that followed thereupon, in the Smalcald Articles, and in the Large and Small Catechism of that most enlightened man Dr. Luther," they were resolved not to depart at all, neither in Rebus (matters) nor in Phrasibus (turns of phrase), but rather

*) According to the well-known distich:
Sint unum, doceant unum, fateantur et unum,
Qui unum de Christi nomine nomen habent.
[Let them be one, let them teach one thing, let them confess one thing — they who bear one name from the name of Christ.]