From Chap 13 of the Krauth biography by Spaeth. Emphasis
added
Do you believe the
fundamental doctrines of God’s Word to be taught in a manner
substantially correct in the doctrinal articles of the
Augsburg Confession? Do you believe that the Augsburg
Confession and the Catechisms of Luther are a summary and just
exhibition of the fundamental principles of God’s Word? This
is as mild a test as could well be presented of a man’s
Lutheranism. Will yours bear it? Do you believe that the
fundamental doctrines of God’s Word are taught in the
Confessions, or have you doctrines which you are
disposed to make fundamental, about which they are silent?
If you have, you are not a Lutheran on our General Synod’s
definition. Do you believe that those fundamental doctrines
are taught in a manner substantially correct, or do
you think the manner is incorrect, even in substantial, poor,
confused, capable of twenty different meanings, each one of
which has as good a claim as any other to recognition, and
that there are arts and mysteries of interpretation by which
our Confessions are Romish and Protestant. Orthodox and
Socinian, Pauline and Pelagian, Zwinglian and Lutheran? If the
latter is your view, you are not a Lutheran as our General
Synod defines the term. When it makes our Confessions a test
of doctrine, it implies that their meaning is ascertainable,
and that they have but one meaning. Are you hugging yourself
in the delusion that you are a Lutheran, because you can
receive, on what you acknowledge to be fundamental, the words
of the Confessions in some sense, though it is
demonstrable, and you know it, that this sense is not theirs,
but yours?
