Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume X.djvu/738

 732 LUTHERAN CHURCH to hold what God has enjoined upon her, or to practise what by his silence he has left to her freedom. Just as firmly as she holds upon the one hand that the Bible is the rule of faith and not a confession of it, she holds on the other that the creed is a confession of faith and not the rule of it. The creeds are simply the testimony of the church to the truths she holds ; but as it is the truth they confess, she of necessity regards those who reject the truth confessed in the creed as re- jecting the truth set forth in the Word. While, therefore, it is as true of the Lutheran church as of any other that when she lays her hand upon the Bible she gives the command, " Be- lieve ! " and when she lays it on the confession, she puts the question, "Do you believe?" it is also true that when a man replies " No " to the question, she considers him as thereby giving evidence that he has not obeyed the command. Very great misrepresentations have been made in regard to certain doctrines of the Evan- gelical Lutheran church, which it may be well to notice. No doctrine can be charged upon her as a church unless it is set forth or logical- ly involved in a confession to which -ehe gives a universal recognition. The only creeds which have this attribute are the oecumenical creeds and the Augsburg Confession. 1. Baptism. The Lutheran church holds that it is necessary to salvation to be born again of water and of the Spirit (John iii. 5, and Augsburg Confes- sion, arts. ii. and ix.) ; but she holds that this necessity is ordinary, not absolute, or without exception ; that the contempt of the sacrament, not the want of it, condemns ; and that though God binds us to the means, he does not bind his own mercy by them. From the time of Luther to the present hour the Lutheran theo- logians have maintained the salvability and actual salvation of infants dying unbaptized. The rest of the doctrine of the Lutheran church, as a whole, is involved in her confessing with the Nicene creed " one baptism for the remis- sion of sins," and that through it the grace of God is offered ; that children are to be bap- tized, and that being thus committed to God they are graciously received by him. At the same time she rejects the theory of the Ana- baptists, that infants unbaptized have salvation because of their personal innocence, and main- tains that the nature with which we are born requires a change, which must be wrought by the Spirit of God before we can enter heaven (A. 0., arts. ii. and ix.), and that infants are saved by the application of Christ's redemptory work, the ordinary medium of which applica- tion is baptism. 2. Consubstantiation. The charge that the Lutheran church holds this doctrine has been repeated times without num- ber, although her theologians without a dis- senting voice repudiate both the name and the thing, in whole and in every one of its parts. In the "Wittenberg Concord " (1536), prepared and signed by Luther and the other leaders in the church, it is said : " We deny the doctrine of transubstantiation, as we do also deny that the body and blood of Christ are locally included in the bread." The " Formula of Concord " says : " We utterly reject and condemn the doctrine of a Capernaitish eating of the body of Christ, which after so many protestations on our part is maliciously imputed to us ; the manducation is not a thing of the senses or of reason, but supernatural, mysterious, and incomprehensi- ble. The presence of Christ in the supper is not of a physical nature, nor earthly, nor Ca- pernaitish, and yet it is most true." It would not be difficult to produce ample testimony of the same kind from writers of other commu- nions. Dr. Waterland, in his work on the doc- trine of the eucharist, speaks thus: "As to Lutherans and Calvinists, however widely they may appear to differ in words and names, yet their ideas seem all to concentre in what I have mentioned. The Lutherans deny every article almost which they are commonly charged with by their adversaries. They disown assumption of the elements into the humanity of Christ, as likewise augmentation and impanation, yea, and consubstantiation and concomitancy ; and if it be asked at length what they admit and abide by, it is a sacramental union, not a cor- poreal presence." D'Aubigne says : "The doc- trines (on the Lord's supper) of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin were considered in ancient times as different views of the same truth. If Luther had yielded (at Marburg), it might have been feared that the church would fall into the ex- treme of rationalism. . . . Taking Luther in his best moments, we behold merely an essen- tial unity and a secondary diversity in the two parties." 3. Ubiquity. The Lutheran church holds that the essential attributes of the di- vine and human natures in Christ are insep- arable from them, and that therefore the attri- butes of the one can never be the attributes of the other. But a large part of her greatest theologians hold also that as his human nature is taken into personal union with the divine, it is in consequence of that union rendered present through the divine, wherever the divine is ; that is, that the human nature of Christ, which as to its finite presence is in heaven, is in another sense everywhere present. " Our church rejects and condemns the error that the human nature of Christ is locally expanded in all places of heaven and earth, or has become an infinite essence." ("Formula of Concord," pp. 548, 695.) "If we speak of geometric locality and space, the humanity of Christ is not everywhere." " In its proper sense it can be said with truth, Christ is on earth or in his supper only according to his divine nature, to wit, in the sense that the humanity of Christ by its own nature cannot be except in one place, but has the majesty (of co-presence) only from the divinity." "When the word corporeal is used of the mode of presence, and is equiva- lent to local, we affirm that the body of Christ is in heaven and not on earth." " Of a local presence of the body of Christ in, with, or