# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1857_S279
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

"On the History of the Most Recent Theology."   279

As the second series of the new orthodox Schwarz names the "Berlin orthodoxy," the "state religion and state theology." "The point of attachment for this tendency was furnished by Pietism. It was the conventicles and mission institutions in which this generation grew up. Thus a peculiar combination of Pietism and orthodoxy is also the characteristic mark of the whole species," and at least in earlier days the view prevailed here generally "of Pietism as something altogether great and glorious, as a further development of the Reformation. The one-sidedness of the old orthodoxy was to be overcome; to purity of doctrine was to be added the inwardness of the life of the heart, to objective orthodoxy subjective believing. The new orthodoxy is, at least in its first appearance, as full of consciousness of sin and of relish for sin as the earlier Pietism ever was. To be sure — and precisely in this does this orthodoxy reveal itself as the modern one — it is not nearly so old-believing as it would like to be. It is rather shot through everywhere with the views and thoughts of the present; it is eaten into by the poison of the philosophy which it combats, and while inwardly it abhors that philosophy, it adorns itself with the forms of its culture. And that is precisely what gives it its piquant after-taste; therein lies for it the possibility of placing itself in the midst of the new age. This orthodoxy appeared in the fashionable costume of a so-called speculative view of the world." After this brief characterization of the Berlin orthodoxy, Schwarz turns to "its visible head, Hengstenberg." This portrait is certainly the most difficult; many have already tried their hand at it (most recently, to my knowledge, Adolf Müller: Hengstenberg und die Evangelische Kirchenzeitung. Ein Wort der Mahnung. Berlin, 1856), but without success; our author has probably succeeded better. He attaches it to that time of testing which called forth the breach between the state theology and Lutheranism. "At the head of the state theology stood Hengstenberg. However skillfully he otherwise knew how to steer between the reefs of the Berlin channel, here his prudence came to shipwreck; however securely he moved on the smooth ground of the state theology, in this struggle over the Union he stumbled; here it became manifest how much he trusted in flesh and blood, and how little in the Spirit. For now, when it came to being in earnest with the confession and with fidelity to the confession — now, when the eyes of all were directed upon the leader of the new orthodoxy — he declared in his Kirchenzeitung (volume 1835, preface) that the difference between the two confessions in the doctrine of the Lord's Supper was unimportant; that "'the mixing of theology and faith always avenges itself'"; that "'when the heart is full of secondary matters, the chief matters find no more room in it'"; that "'what God (in the Union) has joined together must not be put asunder again.'" He, who, born in the Reformed church, had expressly converted to the Lutheran; he, who had never acknowledged the distinction between the essential and the unessential, because