# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1859_S283
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Aus der Kirche [From the Church]. 283

...one must not teach, even though the accused may not actually have taught that way. This part of the symbols is especially important to us; for one understands a doctrine fully only when it is held up beside the false doctrine and developed clearly in contrast to it. The report itself concedes as much when it maintains that the church cannot establish a doctrine so long as it has not yet passed through the struggle. On that basis we should have to look for the most important doctrinal determinations precisely where the symbols come to grips with false doctrine. Even though they arose out of the struggle of their time, they are not for that reason themselves children of their time, but have a worth for all times. Wherever similar false doctrines arise, they must be measured by the standard once won. It does not matter whether the later false doctrines correspond exactly to the condemned false doctrines. The only question is whether such notions are being asserted again, singly or in their totality, in the form in which they were once rejected.

But this is not at all the intention of the Iowans' report when they demand that doctrinal determinations must have passed through the struggle. What they mean to say, rather, is that their new doctrines cannot be affected by the judgment of the symbols, because in this particular form they did not yet exist at that time, and therefore had not yet at that time passed through the struggle and been settled by the church. Let us look at this by way of a single case. The doctrine of the thousand-year kingdom is rejected by Article 17 of the Augsburg Confession. The article knows only of a single return of Christ, at which all the dead will rise, and it then rejects the doctrine that the godly, before this resurrection, would have a worldly kingdom on earth after the ungodly had everywhere been suppressed. This article, according to the Iowans' report, is supposed to be directed against the Anabaptists — of which, to be sure, there is nothing whatsoever stated — and is therefore supposed not to be applicable to Löhe's teaching, even though Löhe asserts precisely such propositions as are rejected here. Further, they object to the whole article on the ground that it had not yet passed through the struggle when it was established. A convenient means of putting inconvenient doctrinal determinations out of the way! Certainly, so long as a doctrine has not yet passed through the struggle, it has not yet had occasion to take shape and unfold. But should a doctrine therefore not be capable of being established in general terms? Then the doctrine that there is a God, that God is one God, that there is a forgiveness of sins and an eternal life, could not be established at all, because no Christian soul doubts it, and no struggle has yet been raised over it.

The great trouble the Iowans take to tear the doctrine of the symbols out of its context — by which alone it becomes intelligible and certain — and then to reduce it to a bare minimum, awakens from the outset the suspicion that innovations are what is really intended. This, to be sure, they altogether deny, and they protest their heartfelt agreement with the symbols — within the stated limits, of course. According to