# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1857_S361
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Survey of New Discoveries in Biblical Chronology, etc.   361

to be correct in confession and doctrine. At last year's autumn conference at Gnadau, President von Gerlach, in a short, piquant address which meant to express only "lay thoughts," sketched the contrast between formerly and now, between the age of pietism and that of churchliness, the age of subjectivity and that of objectivity. He speaks of the church as an institution, of the liturgical forms in contrast to the free prayers formerly used in the church, of the treatment of the sermon, of the emphasis upon the office, upon the claims of the office, upon the consciousness of the office, upon confession, and so forth. He closes his survey with the words: "I am no laudator temporis acti, and although I must bring out the energy of love in that earlier time, I nevertheless find in the present a great advance: from pietism to churchdom, from the individual to the Basileia." But of the confession he is silent! He touches on it only with the remark: "Christianity as the way of salvation no longer engages us so much; hence now the accentuation of the consciousness of the office," and so forth. Now this is precisely what is distinctive of the Reformation, of the Lutheran, insight: the knowledge of the way of salvation; and the doctrine of the way of salvation is the center of our confession, while the way of salvation itself is that which by rights ought at all times to "engage" us most, because by rights nothing so engages us as the question of the How of becoming blessed. A certain indifference toward the confession and toward correctness in accord with the confession meets us elsewhere too. It shows itself especially in the attitude toward the center of the confession: the doctrine of justification by faith. Men do not contest it, but they set it more to one side. The central position which it occupies in our confession appears in addition as a remnant of Protestant subjectivity, which is to be overcome by churchly objectivity. And what do men set in the center in its place? The sacraments. What then becomes of the verbum visibile? Office and sacrament: these are the bearers of churchly objectivity — in the end at the cost of the doctrine of justification. That is the road which the development of the Roman church also took.

(Communicated.)

Survey of New Discoveries in Biblical Chronology, General World History, and Egyptian Antiquities, together with a Translation of the First Sacred Book of the Ancient Egyptians. By G. Seyffarth, A. A. M. Ph. Th. D. New York, Heinrich Ludwig, publisher, No. 39 Centre St.

Under the above title the esteemed author has now handed over to the public the lectures which he first delivered in New York in the spring of 1856, and has thereby, in connection with the small work recently published by him entitled "The True Chronology of the Old Testament, etc.," laid before the public the results of his more than thirty years of untiring re-