# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1855_S302
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

302 Lutheran Theological Pastor's Library.

[...] once sprang from the spirit of a Johann Gerhard. So let us then thank the Lord that these are so enduring that we may hope they will collapse only together with the collapse of the world itself — but so as then to let us behold the archetype itself, after which they were built. — All orthodox theologians, both those who were Gerhard's contemporaries and those who have written after him, have vied with one another in praising the Loci; even many theologians of the Roman and Reformed church have been unable to withhold their deepest admiration for the work, and have had to express it. In order not to become too lengthy, we forgo adducing testimonies to this. Let it suffice here to let only two men of our own time speak, of whom the first certainly cannot be suspected of old-Lutheran narrow-mindedness, while the competence of the other's judgment can hardly be denied; we mean, first, Schneckenburger. He writes concerning the theology of the seventeenth century, and thus above all concerning the doctrinal exposition of a Gerhard, among other things, the following: "The author holds every respect for the many excellent, brilliant, and profound things that are being done, and have been done, in the language and outlook of our time toward asserting the eternal truths of Christianity. While he counts all this worthy of the most grateful use, and wishes every age to have its right acknowledged in the fullest sense, he confesses — in a clear consciousness of the one-sidedness and limitation which cling in many ways to the old doctrine in its doubly ecclesiastical form *) — that what has become known to him of attempts by more recent theology to reshape church doctrine has only increased his respect for the grandeur and depth of those systems in which our fathers, for centuries, laid down their highest insight, and in which whole, capable men carried out their religious labor of thought, and he consoles himself in his archaistic sympathies with a man (Lessing) who was no antiquarian, and who nevertheless held that the old system was not the work of bunglers and half-philosophers." (See: Beleuchtung der Göttinger Denkschrift, by Dr. L. A. Petri, Hanover 1854, p. 40.) The other man whom we wish to let speak here is our own Kahnis. He writes in "Der innere Gang des deutschen Protestantismus": "Lutheran theology has a line of ancestral theologians to point to, of which it need not be ashamed. Against the dismissive judgments which in many theological circles are still current regarding the theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one may confidently appeal to the more thorough studies of the future .. Hand in hand with the dilettantish versatility and mobility of our scholarship goes a lack of a sense for truth and of common sense, of logical energy, of originality of conception, of a cast as of solid metal"

*) What is the most joyful freedom to a Lutheran, because the truth makes free, must, to be sure, be one-sidedness and limitation to a Schneckenburger. Nevertheless we rejoice in his testimony.