# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1857_S283
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History.   283

tionalism at any price, with the setting aside of all other scruples!" — Concerning the Hengstenbergian party Schwarz further says: "To the great number of these theologians of the state belong above all the Berlin celebrities among the preachers and dignitaries of the church, to whom a great mass of nameless but zealous men in the provinces attached themselves. Into scientific theology this tendency did not at that time reach. Only the Old Testament was worked over by Hengstenberg himself and by spirits akin to him, a Hävernick and a Stier." — Hengstenberg, it is further said, "knows the Berlin ground on which he operates very exactly, and he knows very well in every single case how far he may go, and when he must turn from the tone of the thundering prophet, which he understands so happily how to strike, back into a gentler and more considerate one; in a word, his motto is: "'Be wise as serpents.'" If one now reads the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, one finds indeed a record and an echo of all the ecclesiastical agitations and all the attempted creations in which our time is so rich and in which it proves itself so incapable of begetting" (the creations of the "inner mission," as monkery now calls itself), "but only a very pale picture is gained of the significance which this paper once had in the period of her (his?) hottest struggle and wildest terrorism, that is, in the years 1835—48. Since then the superior force of the political movement has consumed its marrow and has carried much of its polemical venom over into other fields. This paper reached the high point of its heresy-hunting from the appearance of Strauss's Life of Jesus. In the struggle against Baur's critical school, against Rothe's doctrine of the church, against Hegel's pantheism and Feuerbach's atheism. These were the fat years for the theology of damnation, which, however positive it may wish to be, is preponderantly negative, lives upon heresy, needs heresy in order to make men forget the inward untruth and hollowness of its own nature."

"The third faction of the orthodox, who attach themselves to the second and support them as fellow workers, without, however, having the same educational background as they," is according to Schwarz "the very influential and considerable coterie of orthodox dilettantes, such as Göschel, Leo, Gerlach, Huber, Stahl. The most significant intellectually among them is plainly Stahl."

Church and Contemporary History.

I. America.

Death. On July 26 there died the Rev. J. R. Hoffman, pastor of the English Lutheran Trinity congregation at Reading, Pa., who last year wrote the little book noticed in "Lehre und Wehre": The broken Platform.