# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1858_S205
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran-theological Pastors' Library. 205

does not, however, exclude the opposite awareness, that error and
distortion are present in everything I say and teach — only not in
such a way that my teaching would be a murky mixture of truth and
falsehood." And now Hofmann asks whether that is the language of a man
who puts himself forward, on the ground of an extraordinary
communication of the Spirit, as a prophet; whether a prophet could say,
as Baumgarten says, that he does penance for what is faulty and
distorted in his words? But must one, at the name "prophet," necessarily
think only of infallibility? Are there not, according to 1 Cor. 14:29
and 1 Thess. 5:20-21, also prophets in whose spiritual utterances error
is present? It is precisely the extraordinary and unmediated
communication of the Spirit that makes the prophet, and everyone reads
this quite plainly out of the very passages that Hofmann quotes from
Baumgarten. If Baumgarten's words still have any meaning at all, it is
this: that he always speaks out of the Spirit, and therefore also speaks
the truth, but that the form and expression of that truth often
miscarries upon his lips. This changes little in substance. Just as
vainly does Hofmann labor to clear his protégé entirely of
Antinomianism. Baumgarten wants the Law taught only on the basis of
the grace already offered beforehand, and only in the context of the
history of salvation. That is admittedly not the old Antinomianism in so
many words, but it is, in substance, exactly what Luther charges
Agricola with (Erlangen edition 32, 9). It is unambiguously the
doctrine of our Church that no one can receive good who has not first
been brought, through the Law, to the knowledge of sin and to
repentance. With this Baumgarten's teaching cannot be reconciled. But
just as Hofmann has already, in the case of his own errors, developed
the art of arranging and twisting them so that the difference from the
truth catches the eye as little as possible, so he has proven himself
capable of the same in his review.

Nevertheless he by no means wishes to set himself up as champion of
Baumgarten's teaching, with which he himself confesses he does not
agree. Why, then, does he serve the truth so badly that he seeks as far
as possible to cover up Baumgarten's errors and to clear him on every
main point? One will easily see that Hofmann has stepped onto the
battlefield more for his own sake than for Baumgarten's. There are old
scores to settle here. May only certain other scores not escape his own
eye.


Lutheran-theological Pastors' Library.

2. Having placed Homiletics first in rank among the practical
theological disciplines in the narrower sense, we believe we must at
once place Catechetics second. To be sure, there are unfortunately many