The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

Athanasian Creeds shows us, in the face of all errorists of the earlier ages,
to be in the faith of the Church Catholic, so does our unreserved
acceptance of the Augsburg Confession mark us as Lutherans; and the
acceptance of the Apology, the Catechisms of Luther, the Schmalcald
Articles, and the Formula of Concord, continues the work of marking our
separation from all errorists of every shade whose doctrines are in conflict
with the true sense of the Rule of Faith--that Rule whose teachings are
rightly interpreted and faithfully embodied in the Confessions aforementioned.
Therefore, God helping us, we will teach the whole faith of His
word, which faith our Church sets forth, explains, and defends in her
Symbols. We do not interpret God's word by the Creed, neither do we
interpret the Creed by God's word, but interpreting both independently, by
the laws of language, and finding that they teach one and the same truth,
we heartily acknowledge the Confession as a true exhibition of the faith of
the Rule--a true witness to the one, pure, and unchanging faith of the
Christian Church, and freely make it our own Confession, as truly as if it
had been now first uttered by our lips, or had now first gone forth from our
hands.
Fidelity to the Confessions not inconsistent with the right
of private judgment.
In freely and heartily accepting the faith of our Church, as our own
faith, and her Scriptural Confession of that faith, as our own Confession,
we do not surrender for ourselves, any more than we take from others, the
sacred and inalienable right of private judgment. It is not by giving up the
right of private judgment, but by the prayerful exercise of it, not by
relinquishing a just independence of investigation, but by thoroughly
employing it, that we have reached that faith which we glory in confessing.
Could the day ever come, in which we imagined that the Evangelical
Lutheran Church had abused her right of private judgment, so as to reach
error, and not truth by it, we should, as honest men, cease to bear her
name, or to connive at what we would, in the case supposed, believe to be
error. On the other hand, should the Evangelical Lutheran Church ever
have evidence, that we have abused our right of private judgment into the
wrong of private misjudgment, so