# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1857_S276
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...book: "The New Orthodoxy. Hengstenberg and the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung" — and to communicate it to our readers.

With a clear eye, so Ströbel writes, Schwarz has grasped the distinctions within the "new orthodoxy" and, with a practiced pen, has on the whole and in the main drawn them correctly and faithfully; the more deeply lying ground of the whole phenomenon — the practical unusability of the "modern theology" for the people, and the resulting justification of a popular religion over against the esoteric religion of the philosophers — is fully appreciated by him, and only some individual matters of fact does he seem not to have put in their right place. Nor do I hold it to be correct to regard the various forms of the "new orthodoxy" as different species of one genus; the first of these forms must, as standing outside any relation of kinship with the rest, be considered a thing by itself; — but these are secondary matters. Let us now hear the author himself; many a man, even among our own people, may at least at this point learn something from him, were it only the art of distinguishing what is heterogeneous, of not letting oneself be lulled by comfortable illusions, and of gaining a thorough insight into the difference in principle between "orthodox" and orthodox, "Lutheran" and Lutheran. After surveying the forces reckoned as belonging to the "new orthodoxy," Schwarz begins their classification and characterization. "Three series are easily distinguished. In the first stand the strict Lutherans of an older time, the Old Lutherans, whom I wish to have distinguished here already, and very definitely, from the Lutherans of most recent date, the Neo-Lutherans. They are the most consistent, the most orthodox, the purest in their intentions, the most unreserved — not only in their opposition to rationalism and pantheism, but also, and this must be strongly stressed, against the state-church system and against the ruling power of the state. I name men such as Scheibel, Rudelbach, Guericke, Heubner, Harms, to whom among the laity Huschke and Steffens attach themselves. The strict Lutheranism which they wish to preserve as a holy treasure against the unionizing efforts of the age is in fact the last consequence of the orthodox party. For the re-erection of the original and oldest foundations of orthodoxy, the reawakening of the symbolical doctrine, in an age of dogmatic dissolution and indifference — that was plainly its fundamental idea. And to this symbolical doctrine there belonged without doubt the controverted doctrines of the two confessions; to the preservation of old Protestantism there belonged also the preservation of the separate churches and separate confessions into which the Reformation fell apart already at its beginning, and in which it consolidated itself practically as well as theoretically." After an unflattering, and therefore also unflattering-sounding, retrospect upon the history of the Union, Schwarz then continues in his portrayal of the "Old Lutherans" as follows: "Men of this dogmatic tendency, who saw in the Reformed doctrine a mutilation and rationalistic weakening of the