# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1857_S282
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

282   "On the History of the Newest Theology."

when might is set above right, how wavering the determinations are concerning what is fundamental and what is not fundamental in faith — of this the most brilliant testimony is furnished by the in many respects remarkable preface to the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung for the year 1844. The reader is kept in a constant rocking motion, so that at last all concepts are confounded, right and wrong, truth and untruth pass over into one another. In the end it is set forth that there can be no talk of a union carried out in a "'legitimate'" manner in Prussia. But then again those are to be opposed who wish to undermine or to burst the Union, as men who "'strive against God.'" For the Union is a "'fact,'" it is in "'possession.'" The number of its friends is in a great majority and there is every prospect that the "'possession will one day shape itself into a right.'" Still more plainly the sense of these words appears in another place (preface to the year 1847), where it is quite naïvely declared that the Union at that time, when the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung began its course, "'had been so mightily protected by the church government'" and had penetrated so deeply into the life of the church, that to come out unconditionally against it would have been equivalent to renouncing all effectiveness within the territorial church. Besides this very practical consideration and this taking of sides for the "'power of the church government,'" for the "'majority'" and for "'possession,'" we meet in the first-named essay (of the year 1844) with a mass of reflections upon what is fundamental and non-fundamental, upon the principles of Protestantism, upon the obligation to the Symbolical Books, upon the "'free movement in theology,'" which savor much more of Pietism or of the theology of feeling than of orthodoxy, and which would suit a Neander far better than a Hengstenberg. Thus — when it is insisted that the "'ecclesiastical authority must take account of the times in imposing the obligation to the Symbolical Books,'" that in "'a time of ferment and of transition the task is to preserve for the church first of all her chief and fundamental doctrines, those common to all Christian churches, and then those concerning justification by faith and whatever stands in immediate connection with it.'" — When Hengstenberg finally comes to the conclusion that the Union is not only possible and unobjectionable, but even desirable, indeed! that "'the Lord Himself prayed for it in His high-priestly prayer'"; then one may well wonder that he now again belongs to those who undermine the Union, who therefore "'strive against God,'" who are at pains to make this "'unobjectionable and desirable'" unification, "'for which the Lord Himself prayed,'" into something wholly illusory. We do not wonder at it, we who have discerned his practical sense and who in all those serpentine windings and marvelous subtleties see nothing else than the two governing thoughts of his whole editorial activity: 1) No conflict with the power of the state! 2) Destruction of ra-