# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1858_S149
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran-Theological Pastors' Library. 149

wishes to make use of it, read it cum grano salis, since this work too
carries the defects from which all writings of the Halle-pietistic
school suffer; nonetheless the work will render excellent service,
particularly to those who often feel at a loss regarding the invention
and framing of the subject to be treated on the basis of the text, as
well as regarding a clear and fitting arrangement of the material, and
will preserve them from the many false paths into which a young
preacher may so easily fall. Even where the well-grounded young
Lutheran preacher cannot agree with Rambach entirely, his consideration
of the important homiletical questions raised by him will be of
essential benefit and will bring much to clear consciousness for him
about which he would otherwise have remained in doubt and uncertainty.
Even a Dr. Gustav Baur, professor of theology at Gießen, cannot help
but acknowledge, in his "Grundzüge der Homiletik" (Gießen, 1848),
Rambach's work as one of significance. He writes: "We may add that the
work in question (Rambach's Homiletics) is not only still, in many
respects, worth reading today, but is altogether one of the soundest
and most instructive homiletical guides ever written." (p. 57.) It is
true that in more recent times the "Evangelische Homiletik von Chr.
Palmer, Archdeacon in Tübingen," 3rd edition 1850 (1st edition 1842),
is often praised as the one that leaves all homiletical works before it
far behind, indeed as having first presented a true homiletics; yet,
however interesting in particular the rich collection of examples it
contains may be, just as tedious is its diffuseness and just as impure
its spirit. To document the latter, it says, among other things, on
page 51: "This age of rationalism demanded for Christianity no less a
demonstration of its naturalness, of its accord with the moral nature
of man; and however much misunderstanding lay in the separation of the
natural and the positive, of the dogmatic and the moral, rationalism's
task was nonetheless to seek out again, in earnest, the bond by which
the Gospel and sound human understanding, the general moral-religious
nature of man, stand connected with one another. This is also the
lasting gain of its appearance, that, as on the lectern, so too on the
pulpit, a rigidifying into a dead external formula is no longer
possible, but the natural, sound consciousness always demands a
mediation which, to be sure, after rationalism has fulfilled its
mission and outlived itself, is now accomplished in a wholly different
manner than the one that seemed right to it." We think that such a
judgment of the phenomenon of rationalism is by itself quite enough to
thoroughly remove the presupposition that that homiletics would give
the right instruction in preaching. We remark only this much further,
that Palmer's homiletics, while it polemicizes here and there against
rationalism, Schleiermacherianism, etc., is nonetheless itself
permeated by it from beginning to end; it is not an instruction in what
the sermon should be