The Reformed Church Paper of Philadelphia in the number of April 27 [1865] writes the following:
“When the evangelicals had made their excellent confession of faith before the Diet of Augsburg, the Duke of Bavaria asked Dr. Eck: ‘Can you refute this confession with good reasons?’ — ‘Not with the writings of the Apostles and Prophets,’ Eck answered, ‘but with those of the Fathers and Councils.’ — ‘So the Evangelicals,’ replied the Catholic Duke, ‘are in the Scriptures and we beside them.’ Under the name ‘Evangelicals,’ however, were at that time not only the Lutherans, but also the Melanchthonians and Reformed in Germany.”
So far the Reformed Church Paper. Hereby it wants to refute Licentiate Stroebel, who had quite rightly claimed that the Reformed are also “opposed to the evangelical faith”. This refutation, however, is very unfortunate, since it claims that among the Evangelicals mentioned at the presentation of the Augsburg Confession, not only the Lutherans, but also the Melanchthonians and German Reformed were included. With this, the editor of the Reformed Church Paper makes three bad blunders at once:
First, as is otherwise known, there were no Melanchthonians at that time.
Secondly, the Duke could not have meant the German Reformed at that time, since they, as is also known throughout the world, did not want to unite with the Lutherans in the presentation of the Augsburg Confession, in which the Reformed doctrine is rejected in Article 10, because of the existing doctrinal difference, and therefore presented their own, special, so-called Tetrapolitan Confession, which was admittedly received very ungraciously by the Emperor and was not read out before the Imperial Diet.
The third blunder, however, is the worst. The Reformed Church Paper bases its entire argumentation on the fact that the Catholic Duke of Bavaria, in his address, understood under the Evangelicals to be not only the Lutherans, but also the Reformed, and thus also praised their Confession as being contained in the Scriptures; but it is not at all true that the Duke used the expression “Evangelicals”; rather, he expressed himself thus, without any ambiguity: “So I hear, the Lutherans sit in the Scriptures, and we beside them.” —
Are now the Lutherans to be understood not only as Lutherans, but also as Reformed? [Answer: No!] — After this unfortunate attempt to draw polemical weapons from church history, let the dear Reformed Church Paper therefore be warned not to plunge again into the ecclesiastical past for this purpose until it has studied church history somewhat more carefully, and indeed from the sources. In general, it should never forget that one learns by teaching, but that teaching must always be preceded by a certain amount of learning. The more it will do in this, the more modest it will become; for the more one really learns thoroughly, the clearer it becomes to one how much one does not yet know; while just the most superficial knower is usually particularly plagued by the tickle of “scholarship”. W. [Walther]
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Union. With “pleasure” the Apologist presents to its readers a communication from soldiers who, belonging to different confessions, have made union in the camp and now wish to see it carried out at home. In the message, the soldiers, some of whom are Congregationalists, others Evangelicals (Albrecht’s people, Methodists), Baptists, Episcopal Methodists and Evangelical Protestants, declare, among other things, the following: “Do we Evangelical congregations not all have one God, the same Savior, the same creed and the same baptism? Should and must only the name separate us, or the letter, or a word that was put or used this way or that way in the translation of the Holy Scriptures? That we are separated is mainly based on forms; but the main thing is one and the same.” — We think the soldiers are right. That the sects have not yet made a union is due only to unessential things; in the main they are one among themselves, namely in their views of what true Christianity is; on this they are only at odds with the Lutherans, who therefore, of course, cannot unite with them. W. [Walther]
“C. F. W. Walther and Wilhelm Löhe may be worthy conversation partners in our discussion, but some of the most critical problems we face begin where they stopped speaking—or even some distance after they stopped speaking—more than a century ago. We must answer questions of which they could not dream. They [Walther and Loehe] provide us with an ecclesiology shaped for a world in which the church was conceived of as divided into “Konfessionen.” There is no readily understandable American translation of that concept! We have missed the chance to compose an expression of our ecclesiology for the denominational age of North American Christianity. We will reap only confusion and contention among ourselves and in our relations with other churches if we do not begin soon to formulate a proper expression of Biblical truth regarding the church for a post-denominational age. We must do so in humble submission to Scripture and to God's call to confess our faith abandoning use of ecclesiological problems as instruments for serving political interests [!] among us. We must turn to the honest theological exertion [i.e. forgetting Walther!] required for repeating our doctrine of the church in ways that address the situation of the confession of Christ's Word in the early twenty-first century.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments only accepted when directly related to the post.