# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1857_S270
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

270   Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library.

1. the struggle of the converted man, 2. the struggle of testing, 3. the struggle as temptation, 4. the cessation of the struggle in the case of a fall. Section III: The personal fitness for the preservation of the possession of salvation: Christian virtue as faithfulness; 1. its subjective motive (thankfulness), 2. its objective norm, 3. its subjective means, 4. its subjective fundamental power, 5. its extent, 6. the right knowledge of it and the errors of an apparent conscientiousness. Third Part: The Preservation of Salvation, or the concrete appearance of Christian virtue in the fundamental relations of human life. I. Christian piety as the mother of all virtues. II. The exercise of the same as such. III. The fundamental forms of earthly, divinely ordered community and their relation to the exercise of Christian piety (marriage, family, national and civil community, the Church). As to the spirit that breathes through this Ethics, we cannot better characterize it than by reproducing here the motto from Luther which the venerable author has placed before the fourth edition of the work: "Believers are a new creature, a new tree; therefore all these ways of speaking that are customary in the law do not belong here, such as: a believer ought to do good works. Just as it is not rightly said: the sun ought to shine, a good tree ought to bear good fruit, three and seven ought to be ten. For the sun ought not to shine, but it does so unbidden by nature, since it was created for that: so a good tree bears good fruit without more ado; three and seven are ten already, they do not first have to become so. So that here it is not said what ought to happen or to be, but what already now happens and is. Unless you would understand it in a distinguishing way, thus: if it is a sun, then it shall shine; if you are a believer, then you must do good. But this is said of the counterfeit faith and sun; of the true faith and sun it would be ridiculous to speak so." (Halle Works, Tom. XXII, p. 717.) As to the scientific form in which the material is clothed, the author has already himself anticipated the grave misgivings which fell upon our hearts in reading the work through, and which we cannot here conceal either, when he writes in the preface to the first edition: "The second concern which I must yet confess has to do with the individual form of the presentation. For I am weighed down by the conviction that systematic theology among us Germans, even that of the best tendency, suffers from a certain loftiness and abstract formulation of the thought, which stands in a not undisturbing (!) contrast with the divine depth and the fisherman's simplicity of its apostolic origin. To help here, I feel a certain weakness. It is the tendency of the age; it is the residue of inclinations and occupations formerly cherished, under which I suffer and which, in the scientific discussion of Christian knowledge, I have still not entirely succeeded in overcoming." It is indeed a misfortune that most even of the best recent theological productions are written in a language which makes them accessible only to the