# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1857_S280
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...it destroys the firm coherence of faith; he, who had always grasped faith only as the faith of the confession in its dogmatic form, and had abhorred the dangerous distinction between religion and theology! He, the declared party man, now knew how to speak so admirably of "'the perniciousness of party spirit'"; of the "'narrowing of the horizon through the constant gazing upon one and the same point'"; of the great common interests in the kingdom of God, before which party quarrels ought to give way. He, who otherwise knew perfectly well that the conscious and deliberate neutralizing and weakening of a truth of faith, where it is to be confessed, amounts to a denial of it, and knew just as well that a rationalistic tendency runs through the Calvinistic doctrine of the Lord's Supper, that the concept of the sacrament is here caught up in a spiritualistic dissolution — he looked past all these serious misgivings with a light heart, and on this occasion one heard nothing of the otherwise so unavoidable turns of phrase, that "'one may not be yoked together with unbelievers'"; that "'light has no fellowship with darkness'"; that "'Christ does not agree with Belial'"; and so on and so forth. Instead, warning was given all the more emphatically — and this is characteristic of the whole tendency of the state religion and state theology — against the striving for the emancipation of the church from the state, for an organic church constitution built upon the foundations of presbyteries and synods, against the rejection of the territorial prince's summepiscopate and of the prince's liturgical right. Hengstenberg has at all times held fast, in his Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, from the preface of the volume of 1832 down to the present, to this dogma of the state church — and in any case more firmly than to the particular Lutheran confession! And if here too he does not know, as he otherwise does, how to conduct the scriptural proof out of the Old as well as the New Testament — if he must rather concede that the New Testament and the apostolic church are very far removed from our churchly rights of sovereignty of the territorial prince and from our consistorial constitution — still he does not let himself be disconcerted by that; he rather holds that "'one may not apply the standard of the New Testament to the present empirical church'" —" (thus does Hengstenberg translate the "Credimus, confitemur, et docemus, unicam regulam et normam, secundum quam omnia dogmata, omnesque doctores aestimari et judicari oporteat, nullam omnino aliam esse, quam Prophetica et Apostolica scripta cum Veteris, tum Novi Testamenti." Understood? my Old Lutheran fellow believers?); "'since in this church the number of those who have not bowed the knee before Baal is so small that they have no claim to make upon the privilege of the saints, to choose their own shepherds.'" (Understood? To "the privilege of the saints" the saints have "no claim," but the state has! "H., thou art a great God, and there is no deceit with thee!") "In general he nowhere goes into the essence of the church,