# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1858_S200
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

200 Münkel on Prof. Baumgarten's Dismissal.

That more is at stake here, and that it is very different from the
ordinary experiences of a Christian, is asserted by him in the most
emphatic terms. Rather, he claims to have received, in that time of
terror, a communication of the Spirit in an extraordinary and
unascertainable manner, thus not through the ordinary means God has
ordained — the Word of God and the Sacraments. He has not led us more
closely into his extraordinary experiences, but he has left us in no
doubt as to their nature. He repeatedly asserts that he has received an
extraordinary calling, by virtue of which he knows "for what he was
called and appointed by God from his mother's womb, namely to proclaim,
for his part, the word of freedom in Christ into the present age." He
was, he says, so equipped by this communication of the Spirit that he
"never teaches otherwise than in the Spirit," and that it cost him much
before he attained the certainty "that every word of his lips was
consecrated and stamped by the divine power of the Holy Spirit." Prof.
B. thus claims nothing less — as he also gives quite plainly to
understand — than that he has received a prophetic consecration in
order to take a stand, in God's name, against the immeasurably deep
corruption of the Church. He himself states what follows from this. The
Holy Spirit is not bound to the churchly means of grace; the written
Word of God itself is a killing letter that does not serve to lead one
into the spirit of truth, but only to confirm the truth one has already
found inwardly, beforehand, through revelation of the Spirit. Or, if one
is of the truth, one can afterward test it against the Word of God and
see how the two agree. If this is so, then the true revelation of God
must rest nowhere else than in ourselves, and must be drawn from there.
"God's self-testimony in us," he says, "is an ineradicable component"
of our nature, and thereby "the possibility is given, whenever and
wherever God meets us within time and the world, of recognizing with
complete certainty that it is he and no other." B. has thus set the
"inner light" back upon the throne, and has thereby swung himself up
above the divine authorities.

What, then, are the extraordinary revelations he has received? One
must marvel that he himself has not felt how exceedingly meager these
turn out to be after such bright blasts of the trumpet. He does away
with nothing less than all the chief doctrines of the Bible, and puts in
their place a concoction that betrays itself as a curious mixture drawn
from every quarter under the sun. The Trinity, the deity of Christ, the
incarnation of God, and of course whatever is bound up with these, find
no room in his teaching, or are drenched and dissolved in the acids
peculiar to him. One is not to expect that even one of the doctrines
that remain should keep its own proper meaning. The Fall of Man consists
in this: that animality has gained dominion over humanity