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

original; which original alone, just as the sacred penman left it, is
absolutely in every jot and tittle God's Word; but just in proportion as our
translation is based upon a pure text of the Hebrew and Greek, and
correctly explains the meaning of such an original, it too, is God's Word.
Our sermons are human explanations of God's Word, but so far as they
explain it correctly, they do set forth God's Word, and he who hears us,
hears our Lord. Our Confession is a human explanation of God's Word,
but so far as it correctly explains it, it sets forth God's Word. The man who
regards it as a correct explanation, or as "a summary and just exhibition"
of the doctrines of which it treats, is consistently a Lutheran. No other man
is. If any man can define Lutheran consistency in any better way, we
should be glad to have him do it; and if he thinks human explanations are
something antagonistic to scriptural doctrine, we wish to know, if he be a
clergyman or a Sunday-school teacher, or a father, why he spends so many
Sundays in the year in setting forth his "human explanation" to his people
or his class or his children, instead of teaching them Hebrew and Greek. If
he says that he believes that the "human explanations" of the authorized
version he reads, and of the sermons he preaches to his people, or the
instructions he gives to his pupils or his children, are scriptural, because
they agree with Scripture, we ask him to believe that his church in her
faith, that the "human explanations" of her Confession (framed in earnest,
prayerful study of the Holy Scriptures, and in the promised light of the
Holy Spirit) are correct and scriptural, may have as much to justify her as
he has in his confidence in his own sermons, or his own lessons. We do
not claim that our Confessors were infallible. We do not say they could
not fail. We only claim that they did not fail.
Fidelity to the Confessions not Romanizing.
Those who smile at the utterance of a devout Father of the Church: 'I
believe it, because it is impossible'--smile because they do not understand
him; yet there would seem to be no solution but that given in the absurdest
sense of his words, for an objection sometimes made to a hearty
acceptance of the Lutheran Confession--to wit, that such an acceptance is
Romanizing. Yet there are