Krauth - Baptism

19th Century
confessional movement

This sent me to the web - my knowledge of church history has a gap here. On Wikipedia I found the following statement which for a number of reasons surprised me:

"Quia subscription (the Book of Concord is adhered to because it is faithful to the Scriptures) implies that the subscriber believes that there is no contradiction between the Book of Concord and the Scriptures. Quatenus subscription (the Book of Concord is adhered to insofar as it is faithful to the Scriptures) implies that the subscriber leaves room for the possibility that there might be a contradiction of the Scriptures in the Book of Concord in which case the subscriber would hold to the Scriptures against the Book of Concord."

Is this an accurate statement and, if so, any suggestions on where to go to learn the origin of the Quia position?

I cannot speak officially for anyone but myself.  In addition, I have managed to accidently exit out of this response multiple times before, so maybe God is telling me I shouldn't say anything... <G>

It is an accurate statement.  If I remember from that wikipedia article, it makes some claims about what it means to be a confessional lutheran which are debatable, I am not aware of any Lutheran theologian who would out and out defend subscribing to the book of concord insofar is it is scriptural.  That is simply a pious sounding, but meaningless statement.  If I say I subscribe to the Koran insofar as it agrees with scripture, I say nothing about how much or little it actually agrees with scripture.  That is a very different statement than to say that I believe, teach and confess that the Nicene Creed is a scriptural confession of who God is.

A classic statement is: http://www.ctsfw.net/media/pdfs/walthersubscribe.pdf It was recommended reading at the ELCA school I attended.  Notice that we say we subscribe to the doctrinal content of our confessions.  So, Luther's Baptismal booklet baptismal rite is an example of a rite that does NOT need to be the same everywhere (Augsburg Confession 7).  Our lexicons need not say that "God" and "Good" have the same derivation, even if Luther claims it in the Large Catechism.  Our Physicists need not say that magnets are influenced by various juices like the Formula of Concord says.

For better or worse, one other source from our teaching on this is you Roman Catholics.  After the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555 if I recall correctly) it was legal to teach ONLY according to the Roman way or the Augsburg Confession.  Calvinists were NOT included until the Peace of Westphalia.  Jesuits would raise a fuss whenever it looked like someone was breaking this law.[6]

Other resources would include Round 1 of the American Lutheran Roman Catholic Dialogue - on the status of the Nicene Creed in the Church.  Section 1 of the Hutter I posted yesterday has some basic discussion, as well as some of the other 19th Century American things I posted here in September, like Mann's two works or Hoffman's Broken Platform.