# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1857_S359
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

359

(From the Saxon Kirchen- und Schulblatt of Prof. Dr. Luthardt.)

The Ecclesiastical Development of the Last Decades

has several very clearly recognizable stages, some of which it has already traversed, others of which it is in the act of traversing. Against rationalism there first arose pietism. It emphasized believing as something individual — the conversion, regeneration, and divine sonship of the single subject. Within the outward church one sought out the believers, the children of God, and joined with them as a special Christian fellowship within the outward churches. What church name they bore was not asked after: that was a matter of indifference. How matters stood with their doctrine was likewise little asked after, if only they were children of God. The former was indeed in order, for faith is the individual's own affair, and each must stand in personal fellowship with God in Christ, and Christianity must gain a personal existence in him. So the Reformation too began: with the demand for personal possession of salvation and personal certainty of salvation. But the other point was not in order. For doctrine is the self-utterance of the actual state of salvation in Christ. It is therefore both a sign and a means of right or wrong possession of salvation. Hence with the Reformation there was at once bound up, with that demand for a certain possession of salvation and personal certainty of salvation, the other demand for right doctrine, because men had learned how it was precisely wrong doctrine that had perverted the possession of salvation itself and robbed men of the certainty of salvation. That, now, is the one-sidedness of pietism. Hence it does indeed bring about a Christian subject — though not always, and not by its own merit, a sound one — but not a church.*) In that it lays the emphasis on the believing of the subject and not on the content of that subject's faith, it necessarily led — because it led to indifference toward objective doctrine — to unionizing endeavors, which make the doctrinal differences of the churches a matter of indifference. Pietism and rationalism in league have made the unions. Even now the two stand in league with one another on the ground of the Union, until the lean cows of rationalism shall have devoured those of pietism.

The first step backward, from rationalism back to pietism, drove of necessity to the second: to the Reformation itself, and therewith from faith to the churchly confession. The Union helped to press toward this, in that it called forth the opposition to its own ecclesiastical vagueness. Partly national motives, partly religious insight and one's own experience of salvation led to Luther's Reformation and to the confession of the Lutheran Church, alongside which only in more recent times has the more decided emphasis upon the Reformed confession placed itself. For the most part only under many afflictions and oppressions on the part of the church governments

*) Rightly understood, entirely true!   L. u. W.