# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1856_S50
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

50 Lutheran-Theological Pastors' Library.

...Revelation, together with a brief guide to examining the various parties within it. — We are convinced that the study of this work is not only excellently suited to strengthen the believer in his faith (which we can attest from our own experience), but that also a doubter who possesses even only natural earnestness and love of truth must, under God's blessing, be healed of his doubts through it. We further recall that Dr. Bock took Lilienthal's work into account and treated most fully precisely that which, in the latter, according to its own peculiar plan, is either passed over or touched on only in passing (obiter); so that the two works mutually complete one another, and only together make up a complete Lutheran apologetics. Both named apologists offer the example — already grown rare in their time — of a truly Christian, collegial rivalry in the defense of divine truth. It cannot, indeed, be denied that these named works, too, bear the stamp of the era in which they arose, and that in them that simplicity and power of faith no longer appears by which the theological works of the 16th and 17th centuries so far surpass all the writings of later times.

3. Having now called attention to two works in which theology takes up the defensive against its assailants, we must now name for our esteemed readers those in which it takes an offensive stance against them — the polemical works. — As for, firstly, the principles according to which the elenchus of doctrine is to be carried out, what Buddeus gives on this matter, in the Isagoge hist.-theol. ad theologiam universam already described above under I.2 (see the May issue of last year), in the chapter on polemical theology, should already suffice. The best German compendium of polemical theology — in which, besides the development of the principles of this discipline, a brief history of the parties concerned, a presentation and assessment of the points of controversy, and the relevant literature are also given — is the following: "Historical and Theological Introduction to the Religious Controversies That Have Arisen, Especially Outside the Evangelical-Lutheran Church; edited by Dr. Johann Georg Walch." Jena, 1724. (Third edition, of 1738.) In this polemical work the apologetics is included as well; just as, in general, in the writings of our older theologians, apologetics, polemics, and symbolics are for the most part treated together, and even, along with moral theology, already within dogmatics itself. Walch's work falls into 9 chapters, having the following content: 1. On the Nature and Necessity of Polemical Theology, as Well as on the Means of Pursuing It. 2. On the Proper Prudence and Caution with Which One Must Pursue Polemical Theology and Conduct Oneself in Theological Controversies. 3. On the Religious Controversies Pending between Our Church and the Roman Church: a. On the Origin, Growth, and Fortunes of the Papacy, as Well as of Its