The Confessional Principle: Quotes from Krauth

Welcome to another excessively long post! With lots of beautiful black print... Indeed, perhaps this post could be more aptly titled, "The Confessional Principle: Extended Quotes from Krauth." Regardless of the volume of information, I consider it valuable and necessary given the challenges facing Confessional Lutheranism in America today, and present it as a resource to those for whom these issues are also of concern.

From blogging over the past year on the issues of Lutheran Worship, the Lutheran Confessions, and the various infections of the Church Growth Movement (CGM), and from conversations with fellow laymen on these subjects, I have come to the impression that most Lutheran laymen are uninformed regarding the Principle of Confessionalism. It seems that most are under the mistaken impression that Confessional subscription is to merely say, "I confess to believe everything the Bible says," leaving them with private judgment and wholesome affinity for Christian Brethren as the material basis for Confessional unity. As a result, a growing number of such laymen seem to be growing frustrated with what they see as "the burdensome strictures of Confessionalism as it has been traditionally understood and practiced," and are growing active in their movement away from it. A growing number of Lutheran pastors and theologians, seem to be complicit in this movement. There is a marked degradation of catechesis and in the quality of catachetical materials, a wholesale abandonment of doctrinal and ecclesiastical language, not only in preaching and teaching, but in publications as well, and a rather well-documented willingness and desire to venture away from identifiably Lutheran practice, to experiment with that of the sectarians, and to thus rely on the aberrant doctrinal foundations of those sectarian practices. In general, there seems to be a growing desire for equivocation on "non-fundamentals" in doctrine and practice, and to appeal to adiaphora in defense of it.

Having no idea what Confessionalism is, or what the Lutheran Confessions say, most Lutheran layman are unable to call upon Confessional norms as they consider their own understanding of Scripture, and are unable use these norms as a basis for evaluating what they are told in the name of the Church. Pastors who are not deliberately overt in their Confessionalism, contribute to the confessional poverty of the laity. This is important, because it is one's Public Confession that marks him as what he claims to be.

Because such poverty seems to be rampant, I have decided to post the following selections from Ch. V of Charles Porterfield Krauth's Conservative Reformation, entitled "The Confessional Principle." The book is available online here, and can be purchased in book form here. The Conservative Reformation is a dense work -- it is not easy reading for most folks. What I have done, below, is to break up Krauth's discussion of the Confessional Principle by annotating it with my own descriptive headings and highlighting what I consider to be some of the key points.

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Excerpts from Chapter V of
C.P. Krauth's

Conservative Reformation


"The Confessional Principle"

The Word of God Alone is the Rule of Faith.
The thetical statements of the [General] Council and the declaration which follows, exhibit, as we believe, the relation of the Rule of Faith and the Confessions, in accordance with the principles of the Conservative Reformation. Accepting those principles, we stand upon the everlasting foundation – the Word of God: believing that the Canonical Books of the Old and New Testament are in their original tongues, and in a pure text, the perfect and only rule of faith. All these books are in harmony, each with itself, and all with each other, and yield to the honest searcher, under the ordinary guidance of the Holy Spirit, a clear statement of doctrine, and produce a firm assurance of faith. Not any word of man, no creed, commentary, theological system, nor decision of Fathers or of councils, no doctrine of Churches, or of the whole Church, no results or judgments of reason, however strong, matured, and well informed, no one of these, and not all of these together, but God's word alone is the rule of faith. No apocryphal books, but the canonical books alone, are the rule of faith. No translations, as such, but the original Hebrew and Chaldee of the Old Testament, and the Greek of the New, are the letter of the rule of faith. No vitiation of the designing, nor error of the careless, but the incorrupt text as it came from the hands of the men of God, who wrote under the motions of the Holy Spirit, is the rule of faith. To this rule of faith we are to bring our minds; by this rule we are humbly to try to form our faith, and in accordance with it, God helping us, to teach others – teaching them the evidences of its inspiration, the true mode of its interpretation, the ground of its authority, the mode of settling its text. The student of theology is to be taught the Biblical languages, to make him an independent investigator of the Word of the Holy Spirit, as the organ through which the Spirit reveals His mind. First of all, as the greatest of all, as the groundwork of all, as the end of all else, we are to teach God's pure Word, its faith for faith, its life for life; in its integrity, in its marvelous adaptation, in its divine, its justifying, its sanctifying, and glorifying power. We are to lay, as that without which all else would be laid in vain, the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets – Jesus Christ being the chief corner-stone.

The Rule of Faith is not its own Creed.
Standing really upon the everlasting foundation of this Rule of Faith, we stand of necessity on the faith, of which it is the rule. It is not the truth as it lies, silent and unread, in the Word, but the truth as it enters from that Word into the human heart, with the applying presence of the Holy Ghost, which makes men believers. Faith makes men Christians; but the Confession alone marks them as Christians. The Rule of Faith is God's voice to us; faith is the hearing of that voice, and the Confession, our reply of assent to it. By our faith we are known to the Lord as his; by our Confession, we are known to each other as his children. Confession of faith in some form is imperative. To confess Christ, is to confess what is our faith in him. As the Creed is not, and cannot be the Rule of Faith, but is its Confession merely, so the Bible, because it is the Rule of Faith, is of necessity not its Confession. The Bible can no more be any man's Creed, than the stars can be any man's astronomy. The stars furnish the rule of the astronomer's faith: the Principia of Newton may be the Confession of his faith. If a man were examined as a candidate for the chair of astronomy in a university, and were asked, 'What is your astronomical system?' and were to answer, 'I accept the teaching of the stars,' the reply would be, 'You may think you do – so does the man who is sure that the stars move round the world, and that they are not orbs, but gimlet-holes to let the glory through. We wish to know what you hold the teachings of the stars to be? Do you receive, as in harmony with them, the results reached by Copernicus, by Galileo, by Kepler, by Newton, La Place, and Herchel, or do you think the world one great flat, and the sun and moon mere pendants to it?' 'Gentlemen,' replies the independent investigator, 'the theories of those astronomers are human systems – man made theories. I go out every night on the hills, and look at the stars as God made them, through a hole in my blanket, with my own good eyes, not with a man-made telescope, or fettered by a man-made theory; and I believe in the stars and in what they teach me; but if I were to say or write what they teach, that would be a human creed – and I am opposed to all creeds.' 'Very well,' reply the examiners, 'we wish you joy in the possession of a good pair of eyes, and feel it unnecessary to go any further. If you are unwilling to confess your faith, we will not tax your conscience with the inconsistency of teaching that faith, nor tax our own with the hazard of authorizing you to set forth in the name of stars your own ignorant assumptions about them.'

Fidelity to the Rule of Faith demands that it be Confessed in the form of a Creed.
What is more clear than that, as the Rule of Faith is first, it must, by necessity of its being, when rightly used, generate a true faith? But the man who has true faith desires to have it known, and is bound to confess his faith. The Rule cannot really generate two conflicting beliefs; yet men who alike profess to accept the Rule, do have conflicting beliefs, and when beliefs conflict, if the one is formed by the Rule, the other must be formed in the face of it. Fidelity to the Rule of Faith, therefore, fidelity to the faith it teaches, demands that there shall be a Confession of the faith. The firmest friend of the Word is the firmest friend of the Creed, first the Rule of Faith, and then the Confession of Faith.

The Rule of Faith and its Creed, while in agreement, are independently normative.
What shall be our Confession? Are we originating a Church, and must we utter our testimony to a world, in which our faith is a novelty? The reply is easy. As we are not the first who have used with honest hearts and fervent prayers, the Rule, so we are not the first who have been guided by the Holy Ghost in it to its faith. As men long ago reached its faith, so long ago they confessed it. They confessed it from the beginning. The first adult baptism was based upon a 'human creed,' that is, upon a confession of faith, which was the utterance of a belief which was based upon a human interpretation of divine words. The faith has been confessed from the beginning. It has been embodied in a creed, the origin of whose present shape no man knows, which indeed cannot be fixed; for it rose from the words of our Saviour's Baptismal Commission, and was not manufactured, but grew. Of the Apostles' Creed, as of Him to whom its heart is given, it may be affirmed that it was 'begotten, not made.' The Confession has been renewed and enlarged to meet new and widening error. The ripest, and purest, and most widely used of the old Confessions have been adopted by our Church as her own, not because they are old and widely received, but because they are true. She has added her testimony as it was needed. Here is the body of her Confession. Is her Confession ours? If it be, we are of her in heart; if it be not, we are only of her in name. It is ours – ours in our deepest conviction, reached through conflicts outward and inward, reached upon our knees, and traced with our tears – ours in our inmost hearts. Therefore, we consecrate ourselves to living, teaching, and defending the faith of God's word, which is the confessed faith of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Fidelity to the whole truth of God's word requires this. We dare not be satisfied simply with recognition as Christians over against the Jew, because we confess the Rule of Faith, of which the New Testament is a part, has taught us faith in Jesus Christ; we dare not be satisfied simply with recognition as holding the Catholic Faith as embodied in the three General Creeds, over against heresies of various forms and shades. Christian believers holding the faith Catholic we are – but we are, besides, Protestant, rejecting the authority of the Papacy; Evangelical, glorying in the grace of the Gospel; and Lutheran, holding the doctrines of that Church, of which the Reformation is the child – not only those in which all Christendom or a large part of it coincides with her, but the most distinctive doctrines, though in the maintenance of them she stood alone. As the acceptance of the Word of God as a Rule of Faith separates us from the Mohammedan, as the reception of the New Testament sunders us from the Jew, as the hearty acquiescence in the Apostles', Nicene, and 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 acceptances 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 afore-mentioned. 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.

Confessional subscription does not abrogate 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.

...but both unites those of common judgment and necessarily separates those of opposing judgment.
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 as to have reached error, and not truth by it, then, as a faithful Church, after due admonition, and opportunity for repentance have been given us in vain, she is bound to cast us forth, to purify her own communion, and to make it impossible for us, in her name, to injure others. As the individual, in exercising the right of private judgment, is in peril of abusing it, the Church has the right, and is bound by the duty, of self-defense against that abuse. The right of private judgment is not the right of Church-membership, not the right of public teaching, not the right of putting others into an equivocal attitude to what they regard as truth. A free Protestant Church is a Church, whose ministry and membership, accepting the same rule of faith, have, in the exercise of their private judgment upon it, reached the same results as to all truths which they deem it needful to unite in confessing. After all the intricacies into which the question of, What are fundamentals ? has run, there can be no practical solution better than this, that they are such truths, as in the judgment of the Church, it is necessary clearly to confess; truths, the toleration of the errors opposing which, she believes to be inconsistent with her fidelity to the Gospel doctrine, to her own internal harmony and highest efficiency. The members and ministry of such a Church must have "one faith," as they have one Lord, one Baptism, and one God. Apart from the "unity of the faith," and the "unity of the knowledge of the Son of God," every striving to reach "unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ," will be vain; thus only can Christian men "henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive."

Private judgment is free, but does not entitle one to call himself what he is not.
A great deal is claimed under the right of private judgment, which is a most impudent infringement of that right. A man is a Socinian, a Pelagian, a Romanist. Very well. We maintain, that no civil penalties should restrain him, and no ecclesiastical inquisition fetter him. Give him, in its fullest swing, the exercise of his right of private judgment. But your Socinian insists on such a recognition by Trinitarians as logically implies, that they either agree with him in his error, or that it is of no importance. What is this but to ask thousands or millions to give up or imperil the results of their well-used right of private judgment, at the call of one man, who abuses his? Could impudence go further? 'Go,' they may rightly say, 'with your right of private judgment, go where you belong, and cease to attempt the shallow jugglery, by which one man's freedom means his autocracy, and every other man's slavery. If your right of private judgment has made you an Atheist, don't call yourself a Believer; if it has made you a Jew, don't pretend to be a Christian; if it has made you a Papist, don't pretend to be a Protestant; if it has made you a Friend, don't call yourself a Churchman.'

Confessional subscription is freely enjoined by its subscribers...
When we confess, that, in the exercise of our right of private judgment, our Bible has made us Lutherans, we neither pretend to claim that other men shall be made Lutherans by force, nor that their private judgment shall, or will, of necessity, reach the results of ours. We only contend, that, if their private judgment of the Bible does not make them Lutherans, they shall not pretend that it does. We do not say, that any man shall believe that the Confession of our Church is Scriptural. We only contend, that he should neither say nor seem to say so, if he does not believe it.

...but must remain unpolluted if it is to carry the meaning intended by it.
The subscription to a Confession is simply a just and easy mode of testifying to those who have a right to ask it of us, that we are what we claim and profess to be. So to sign a Confession as to imply that we are what we are not, or to leave it an open question what we are, is not the just result of the right of private judgment, or of any right whatever, but is utterly wrong. For it is a first element of truth, with which no right, private or public, can conflict, that names shall honestly represent things. What immorality is more patent than the pretense that the right of private judgment is something; which authorizes a man to make his whole life a falsehood; is something which fills the world with names, which no longer represent things, fills it with black things, that are called white, with bitter things, that are called sweet, and with lies, that are called truths, with monarchists, who are called republicans, with Socinians, who are called Trinitarians, with Arminians, who are called Calvinists, with Romanists, Rationalists, fanatics, or sectarians, who are called Lutherans?

We concede to every man the absolute right of private judgment as to the faith of the Lutheran Church, but if he have abandoned the faith of that Church, he may not use her name as his shelter in attacking the thing she cherishes, and in maintaining which she obtained her being and her name. It is not enough that you say to me, that such a thing is clear to your private judgment. You must show to my private judgment, that God's word teaches it, before I dare recognize you as in the unity of the faith. If you cannot, we have not the same faith, and ought not to be of the same communion; for the communion is properly one of persons of the same faith. In other words, your private judgment is not to be my interpreter, nor is mine to be yours. If you think me in error, I have no right to force myself on your fellowship. If I think you in error, you have no right to force yourself on mine. You have the civil right and the moral right to form your impressions in regard to truth, but there the right stops. You have not the right to enter or remain in any Christian communion, except as its terms of membership give you that right.

The abuse of private judgment is not to be restrained by persecution.
Before the plain distinctions we have urged, in regard to private judgment, go down all the evasions by which Rationalism has sought to defend itself from the imputation of dishonor, when it pretended to bear the Lutheran name, as if Lutheranism were not a positive and well-defined system of truth, but a mere assertion of the right of private judgment. It is the doctrine of the Reformation, not that there should be no checks upon the abuse of private judgment, but that those checks should be moral alone.

Lutherans are unique in this regard, historically speaking.
The Romanists and un-Lutheran elements in the Reformation were agreed, that the truth must be maintained and heresy extirpated by the sword of government. Error is in affinity with the spirit of persecution. The first blood shed within the Christian Church, for opinion's sake, was shed by the deniers of the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Arians. So strong was the feeling in the primitive Church against violence toward errorists, that not a solitary instance occurs of capital punishment for heresy in its earlier era. The Bishops of Gaul, who ordered the execution of the Priscillianists, though the lives of these errorists were as immoral as their teachings were abominable, were excluded from the communion of the Church. As the Western Church grew corrupt, it grew more and more a persecuting Church, till it became drunken with the blood of the saints. The maxims and spirit of persecution went over to every part of the Churches of the Reformation, except the Lutheran Church. Zwingli countenanced the penalty of death for heresy. What was the precise share of Calvin in the burning of Servetus is greatly mooted; but two facts are indisputable. One is, that, before the unhappy errorist took his fatal journey, Calvin wrote, that, if Servetus came to Geneva, he should not leave it alive, if his authority availed anything; the other is, that, after the burning of Servetus, Calvin wrote his dissertation defending the right of the magistrate to put heretics to death (1554.) The Romish and Calvinistic writers stand as one man for the right and duty of magistrates to punish heresy with death, over against Luther and the entire body of our theologians, who maintain, without an exception, that heresy is never to be punished with death. The Reformed portion of Protestantism has put to death, at different times and in different ways, not only Romanists and Anabaptists, but its terrible energies have been turned into civil strife, and Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents put each other to death, especially in the great civil wars of England, whose origin was largely religious. Strange as it may sound, Socinians themselves have been persecutors, and yet more strange is the ground on which they persecuted. The original Socinians not only acknowledged that Jesus Christ was to be worshiped, and characterized those who denied it as half Jews, but, when Francis David, one of the greatest of their original co-workers, denied it, the old man was cast into prison, and kept there till he died. The Lutheran Church alone, of all the great Churches that have had the power to persecute, has not upon her skirts one drop of blood shed for opinion's sake.

Rather, the abuse of private judgment is to be restrained by denial of Church recognition.
The glorious words of Luther were: " The pen, not the fire, is to put down heretics. The hangmen are not doctors of theology. This is not the place for force. Not the sword, but the word, fits for this battle. If the word does not put down error, error would stand, though the world were drenched with blood." By these just views, centuries in advance of the prevalent views, the Lutheran Church has stood, and will stand forever. But she is none the less earnest in just modes of shielding herself and her children from the teachings of error, which takes cover under the pretense of private judgment. She would not burn Servetus, nor, for opinion's sake, touch a hair of his head; neither, however, would she permit him to bear her name, to "preach another Jesus" in her pulpits, to teach error in her Universities, or to approach with her children the table of their Lord, whom he denied. Her name, her confessions, her history, her very being protest against the supposition of such "fellowship with the works of darkness," such sympathy with heresy, such levity in regard to the faith. She never practiced thus. She never can do it. Those who imagine that the right of private judgment is the right of men, within the Lutheran Church, and bearing her hallowed name, to teach what they please in the face of her testimony, know not the nature of the right they claim, nor of the Church, whose very life involves her refusal to have fellowship with them in their error.

The Right of Private Judgment and the Right of Church Discipline are harmonized by genuine Confessional subscription.
It is not the right of private judgment which makes or marks a man Lutheran. A man may have the right to judge, and be a simpleton, as he may have the right to get rich, yet may remain a beggar. It is the judgment he reaches in exercising that right which determines what he is. By his abuse of the "inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," a man may make himself a miserable slave. The right of property belongs as much to the man who makes himself a beggar as to the man who has become a millionaire. Rights, in themselves, give nothing, and cannot change the nature of things. The right to gather, gathers nothing; and if, under this right, the man gathers wood, hay, stubble, neither the right nor its exercise makes them into gold, silver, and precious stones. The Church will not put any violence upon him who chooses to gather what will not endure the fire; but she will not accept them as jewels, nor permit her children to be cheated with them. The right of private judgment and the right of Church discipline are co-ordinate and harmonious rights, essential to the prevention, each of the abuse of the other. To uphold either intelligently, is to uphold both. In maintaining, therefore, as Protestants, the right and duty of men, in the exercise of private judgment, to form their own convictions, unfettered by civil penalties in the State, or by inquisitorial powers in the Church, we maintain, also, the right and duty of the Church to shield herself from corruption in doctrine by setting forth the truth in her Confession, by faithfully controverting heresy, by personal warning to those that err, and, finally, with the contumacious, by rejecting them from her communion, till, through grace, they are led to see and renounce the falsehood, for which they claimed the name of truth.

In Summary
This, then, is a summary of the result we reach: The basis of the Evangelical Lutheran Church is the Word of God, as the perfect and absolute Rule of Faith, and because this is her basis, she rests of necessity on the faith of which that Word is the Rule and therefore on the Confessions which purely set forth that faith. She has the right rule, she reaches the right results by the rule, and rightly confesses them. This Confession then is her immediate basis, her essential characteristic, with which she stands or falls.

Krauth, C.P. (1871). The Conservative Reformation and its Theology. Philadelphia: Lippincott. (taken variously from pp. 165-175).

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