# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1858_S160
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

160    Church and Contemporary Notes.

condemned congregations would be drawn more into participation in church affairs. Many, to be sure, have great fear and dread of this; they fear a democratic power in the church; but the outcome of the developments in Bavaria, the recent general synods there, and other signs speak rather in favor of the view that the unbelieving and weakly-believing party in the church will not, over against the believing party, let matters come to the utmost extreme. From the side of the believers, however, it is pointed out that a departure from the existing church in the sense of a separation would at the same time mean an abandonment of the poor and in part misled populace — among whom are a great number of weak and uncomprehending persons who know nothing of the matter — and that the Reformation, at any rate, took a different path, and that only a Carlstadt commended a reckless course of action regardless of whether the multitude could follow it or not. A new territorial hymnal is also expected, along with a catechism with explanation, and an Agenda. To be sure, not all that much is achieved by this; the main thing, the Alpha and Omega in the church, remains the pure preaching of the divine Word, which, when it is taught purely and clearly, does the work, and does it alone.

Theology, too, has come into motion. There are clearing, critically-minded spirits who mercilessly expose their weaknesses (Schwarz in Gotha, Vilmar, etc.), and there is also building going on, even if only a feeble beginning has been made. The oppositions coming to the fore here are: false theological scholarship and scholarliness as against a theology that builds upon the treasures already brought to light and preserved by the church of past ages; a so-called biblical theology which, without the guidance of the ancients, seeks to draw out the doctrine from Scripture immediately and independently, according to the much-vaunted grammatico-historical method (a Christian rabbinism), as against the faith of those who hold with Luther that it is not logic, grammar, rhetoric, and, in sum, philosophy — the lumen naturae — that unlocks Scripture, but rather the experience of the truths attested in Scripture; an externalized, bureaucratic churchliness which aims above all at re-establishing outward church order, propriety, discipline, and custom, as against the standpoint of those who, because they know that God's kingdom is a spiritual kingdom, a kingdom of the heart, of freedom, and of living inner conviction, experience, and appropriation, place the greatest weight upon a single doctrine in churches and schools and expect all salvation from this alone. The watchword "pure doctrine" is, to be sure, an abomination to all Pietists and Pietistically-minded persons, for they conceive of doctrine and life, dogma and faith, God's Word and holy conduct as lying far, far apart, and suppose that one wishes by this path to conjure up again the old dead orthodoxy, but do not see that the church is born, nourished, and preserved through the Word. Otherwise, rationalism too, even if in another form, tinged by Schleiermacher and another tendency — one which would like to believe and yet does not arrive at believing, and to which belongs a countless number of distracted spirits — is represented among us. That is, indeed, a quodlibet and a farrago worse almost than in the worst barbarous ages of the Middle Ages and of the deepest scholasticism, when of old Aristotle, the heathen, was the oraculum oraculorum of the Christian-theological world."