# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1859_S282
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

282 Aus der Kirche [From the Church].

...abandon its scriptural proof, imagines to himself a church which, by the inward prompting of the Holy Spirit, arrives at the truth by itself, and can indeed go astray in Scripture, but not in doctrine. That would be even more than the Catholics claim, who let their church go astray neither in doctrine nor in the interpretation of Scripture. But is everything that occurs as scriptural interpretation in the symbols supposed to be binding? Certainly not. That is why in former times a distinction was already made in Scripture between passages that speak expressly of a doctrine and passages that have subordinate significance and serve only to elucidate the main passages, or receive their light from these. It cannot be at all difficult, on this basis, to work out how far the interpretation of Scripture in the symbols is meant to be binding. A correct understanding of the symbols therefore does not proceed, as the Iowans do, from individual isolated doctrinal propositions, but from the scriptural proof, and determines the rest accordingly. That would be historical and Lutheran at the same time.

Furthermore, the scriptural proof must be viewed in the context of Scripture as a whole. Our church, in its scriptural proof, does not proceed merely from individual passages in order to extract the doctrine, as though it still had to find it. It has already found, from Scripture as a whole, the key with which the individual passages must be unlocked — by which it confesses that it means to interpret Scripture by Scripture. On this too the symbols leave no doubt. It is the righteousness of faith by which their interpretation of Scripture is governed, and according to which they direct and shape every doctrinal proposition. But this is not to be understood in the sense of certain more recent theologians, who take as their standard not the Lutheran doctrine of justification but their own watered-down version of it. The symbols' doctrine of justification unfolds in the doctrines of sin, of law and gospel, of the order of salvation, of the person and work of Christ, and of the means of grace. Strictly speaking, every essential doctrine serves to bring a new facet of justification to light. For understanding the symbols it is therefore indispensable to view their interpretation of Scripture from the standpoint of justification. If one does this, one will soon find how coherent, self-contained, and unified the symbols' outlook is. Once one is in agreement with them on this main point, one no longer feels the need to make an extract that is supposed to pass for the concentrated essence of the symbols. That the Iowans say nothing at all about this, that they do not even touch on this main point, is a bad sign. They seem to want to enter the symbols by a different door.

If, further, the report means to suggest that the symbols are a child of their time, that is true only insofar as they were born out of the struggles of their time. Some error in the understanding of the opposing doctrine may well have crept in here, as indeed the presentation of A. Osiander's doctrine has already been drawn upon earlier. But that is of no significance whatsoever. We do not intend to study the history of dogma from the symbols. The form in which a doctrine is rejected can rightly show us how one must not