# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1855_S301
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran Theological Pastor's Library. 301

The argumentation from Scripture is throughout clear and thorough; the refutation of opponents is pervaded as much by the spirit of love toward them as toward the truth, and is so telling — tracking the opponent down into every hiding place and at every point robbing him of his last support — that further contradiction seems impossible; *) the application, both of the whole and of the particular, is simple, lucid, well-ordered; free of scattering fragmentation — a fault at times of later dogmaticians — the whole development of doctrine, with its linguistic, historical, and antithetical excurses, flows along cheerfully like one great stream, tracing pleasant windings upon a clear bed; everything is as if cast from a single mold. Moral theology is here not yet separated from dogmatics; it appears here like the grapes welling up from the juicy vines. Biblical isagogics, hermeneutics, exegesis, the history of doctrine, patristics, and polemics are here not appended as a mere valuable addition, but are organically fitted into the whole, as beams just as necessary as ornaments in this wondrous structure. The expression and style are so precise and yet so simple and lively, the development of the matters proceeds, for all its exhaustive thoroughness, so swiftly and without tiresome repetitions, even the driest and most subtle subjects are set forth with such exceptional freshness and ease, everything is treated with so holy an earnestness and the words are so steeped in a godly spirit, that one, carried away by the speech of this precious man, does not know whether one has before oneself a work for the advancement of Christian scholarship or a devotional book; one does not grow weary, however long one reads in it, and one senses how light and warmth proceed from this speech of noblest simplicity and true depth of spirit. In sum: in our judgment this dogmatics is the most glorious, the most perfect thing that has ever been achieved in Christendom in this field, in both content and form, and will probably remain, until the Last Day, a model for all who attempt anything in this field. Were the wish not too bold, we would express it as our greatest wish regarding theology, that God would grant our latest age a man who, as a second Gerhard for our time, would have mastered within himself and for Christendom the contradictions of the past century and of the present, just as Gerhard mastered those of his own past and present, and would give us a continuation of his immortal Loci. But just as little as our age seems capable of conceiving and creating a second Strasbourg Cathedral, so little — and even less — does it seem capable of spiritual architectural creations such as

*) It is therefore understandable that Gerhard, during his lifetime, found not a single one who dared to take up the struggle against him. But when death had at last torn from the hands of this hero the formidable sword of his harmless pen forever, then at last so great a courage awoke among Calvinists and Papists that men now took the field even against a Gerhard, and revealed to the astonished world the great weakness under which his lines of argument, hitherto unsuspected, had suffered.