# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1858_S181
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Irvingism. 181

...writings by Rudelbach. As little as we can now agree with Rudelbach
when he here expresses the intention and the wish "that Lutheran
Christians may regard them (the Irvingians) as erring brethren," since
we are firmly convinced that the Irvingians, with their enthusiastic
doctrine of office, of church, and of chiliastic hope, overturn the
foundation of the Christian faith in utter blindness to the nature of
the Gospel: nevertheless we must point to Rudelbach's critique of the
Irvingian principles, so far as it already lies before us, as a most
valuable contribution to a Lutheran polemic against the aforementioned
sectarianism. We find the result of this critique in the following
words of Rudelbach's: "Their theory of the four offices in the church
is nothing more and nothing less than a spider's web, on which they
have fastened their whole structure in mid-air. What Luther above all,
and rightly, demands — namely, that wherever we wish to determine
something according to Scripture, we must have before us a firm, clear,
certain word of God — is here so little heeded that, on the contrary,
the principal passages not only can but must be interpreted
differently, if Scripture is to agree with itself at all. The whole
system is, in every vein and fiber, a Donatist one; it cannot come to
rest until it arrives at the conclusion that ""all believers must be
gathered into one, and shown to be one through visible separation from
unbelievers.""

The narrow space of our journal does not permit us to communicate the
whole critique here. We content ourselves with reproducing here the
résumé which Rudelbach gives of the Irvingian doctrines, on the basis
of the three writings reviewed by him. Rudelbach himself says of this:
"We fear neither that in the foregoing outline we have imputed to the
Irvingian friends and brethren anything that does not lie in their own
sense — for which reason we have everywhere quoted their own words —
nor that any essential element of this theory has been overlooked or
passed by; nor has any part of the consideration been given any other
value than precisely the one they themselves placed upon it."
Rudelbach's résumé is as follows:

It is, to be sure, not the first time that the restoration of the
church, where it was postulated as a new, absolute beginning, was based
on a theory of the restoration of the gifts of grace, offices, and
powers; not the first time that a renewal was undertaken before the
renewal of which it was said: "Behold, I make all things new." From the
Donatist gift-charisms (Optatus, On the Schism of the Donatists, II,
1-10) down to the prophets of Languedoc (who soon extended their
prophesying over all Europe) at the beginning of the 18th century, this
thought has repeatedly flashed up, like lightning shooting across a
clear sky. Just as little is it the first time that passages of the
Old and New Testament, though otherwise