# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1857_S275
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

"On the History of the Most Recent Theology."   275

...teachers; 2. of divine worship; 3. of church government; 4. of the heresies and separations; 5. of the outward condition of the church; 6. of the inward condition of Christians; and 7. of incidental matters. Under this last title there is treated, for example, as regards the first century of the Christian church, the condition of heathenism and of Judaism, the apocrypha of the New Testament, and so forth. Throughout, the sources from which the author has drawn are exactly given beneath the text. Of especially great value are the biographies which are given of every church teacher of any influence, to which a list of his writings is then always appended. The spirit in which the work is written is, given the number of those who worked on it, in an age such as that of its appearance was, naturally a varied one. The spirit which moved the chief laborer, Heinsius, we should like to call that of mediation, inasmuch as he — for example, as regards the so-called Pietists — does not indeed deny their defects, but also gladly praises in them whatever nonetheless appears to him praiseworthy. The later laborers present themselves rather as the decided opponents of the Pietists. Yet the account both of the latter and of the former bears throughout the stamp of a strict love of truth, so that the work bears the title "Unpartheiische Kirchenhistorie" not without right. We do not doubt that every Lutheran pastor, if he procures for himself this history of the church, will regard the few thalers it may cost him as a very small sacrifice, by which he has purchased for himself an exceedingly valuable treasure.

(To be continued.)

"On the History of the Most Recent Theology."

Under this title there appeared last year a work by Karl Schwarz, extraordinary professor of theology at Halle (now upper consistorial councillor in Gotha), published by Brockhaus in Leipzig, which Licentiate Ströbel presents in excerpt in the 3rd quarterly number of the current volume of the Rudelbach-Guericke "Zeitschrift für lutherische Theologie und Kirche," and from which he demonstrates "the confusion of tongues among the neo-Babylonian tower-builders." For although Schwarz, as is well known, belongs to the rationalistic school, he has nevertheless in the work referred to given distinguished proof of his calling as a historian. With rare objectivity he presents to the reader individual persons and whole schools and parties according to their principles, their mutual relations, their significance, and so forth — the less led astray by considerations of persons, the less he himself, as a mere critic, has to lose thereby. The limited space of our journal does not permit us to lay the whole of Ströbel's excerpt before our readers; let it therefore suffice to give the excerpt of that part which Ströbel himself calls the most important of the whole