# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1856_S8
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

8                    Some Glosses on Bunsen's Aphorisms and His "Position and Task," etc.

sent day need the healing of their wounds through a Christianity that gives evidence of a life-renewing freshness, standing allied with reason and conscience . . . meanwhile, however, let us not press for national forms, as though they were one with divine truth itself; let no dogmatic formula suppress conscience and reason . . . then no zeal shall be called Christian that is not sanctified by love, no faith, that is not confirmed by reason." From this one sees clearly enough where Bunsen is heading with his dogmatics; now, too, an enlightened sentence from his ethics: "I, for my part, am convinced that in the churchly sphere the moral life, as a work of self, as religion itself properly speaking, is, before all else, to be striven after, and this especially by the enlightened." How can Schaff set forth such old, threadbare, insipid stuff as a sample of the "newest, most significant, extremely interesting" theology? It is altogether incomprehensible! —

Now let us also hear a sample of Bunsen's "extremely stimulating and spirited glimpses into the past, present, and future of the church," as Schaff calls them. "Romanism" (meaning the heathen kind) "taught Christianity to cast the spirit, in its application to the relations of human society, into form; it taught it to govern with order." Something of this sort really brings a poor bush-pastor's understanding to a standstill. Romanism is supposed to have taught Christianity to govern with order?! In what way, then — how, then — when, then? Schaff, the church historian, ought surely to have recognized the nonsense at once, and at the very least indicated it with a question mark. — I do not know; one becomes altogether bewildered by the historians. — The glimpse into the present of the church is thoroughly modern-German: so befogged, so all-embracing and yet amounting to nothing, so indescribably unhealthy and impractical, that one can scarcely restrain a certain national melancholy. Hear what is supposed to be above all the calling of the Germanic peoples: "to consecrate civil liberty in a Christian sense; to develop and complete Christendom in a popular and humane, that is, a civic-national, way — this is the task of the present." So, then, a civic-national completion of Christianity is what the present age needs. Oh, the sorrowful, clever counselors! — Poor German people!

Bunsen's glimpses into the future of the church disclose something truly wondrous: the Union will celebrate its triumph; Scripture and reason will be so inseparably united — for that is exactly what the Union seeks — that all doubts and — all creeds shall vanish away, and the union of these two pillars, Scripture one pillar — and reason the other pillar — shall come to pass in the true faith in the Divine. Scripture unites itself, through faith in the Divine — which, one hopes, will soon be discovered somewhere or other — with reason; or, conversely, as Scripture believes, so now also does reason believe; both hold one faith, both