# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1858_S215
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Theological Faculty at Jena. 215

[transfer him] to a place suited to his bodily weakness: yet in doing so
the elders must determine his transfer only after they have first waited
a longer time to see whether his health can be restored, and the judgment
of physicians must first be obtained.

We forbear to gather proofs here for our opinions, so as not to repeat
what has already been said. Whoever wishes may consult Reßler's Theat.
cas. consc. p. 56, Georg König's cas. consc. p. 738 seq., Brochmann's
System. Theol. II, de Ministerio c. 3, cas. 8.

(To be continued.)

The Theological Faculty at Jena.

The University of Jena observed on February 6 of this year its change of
pro-rector. This recurs every half-year and is in and of itself not worth
mentioning. But the address which the newly elected pro-rector, Professor
of Theology Rückert, delivered on the occasion is all the more
noteworthy. In it he spoke with commendable candor about the position of
the Jena theological faculty relative to the other theological faculties
of the evangelical church, and did not conceal that it alone still
pursues a course that the others abandoned long ago. He said: "Jena's
theologians can — or rather, they are willing to admit — that not only in
Germany, but everywhere an evangelical church exists in the old world and
the new, they are the only faculty that still finds itself in the same
essential position in which it has now stood for nearly a century, and
which not too long ago was the general position of all." He compares
Jena theology to the islands off the North Sea which the ocean waves
erode year by year and threaten at last to destroy, but holds fast to the
hope that it will not always remain so, that the just cause will yet
prevail in the end.

Professor Rückert speaks in the name of the faculty, and we truly do not
know a single member of it whom we could credit with disputing this
confession, for it is precisely those Jena theologians of whom one might
suppose otherwise who are contributors to the "Protestant Church
Gazette," thus placing themselves on the same footing as Schwarz of
Gotha, the most resolute opponent of the evangelical confession of
faith. We are therefore entitled to regard that speech of Rückert's as a
confession of the whole faculty. It is an open confession of
rationalism, for that is the direction which for about a hundred years
has been penetrating the evangelical church, and which not too long ago
was the general position of all. The faculty thus still confesses itself
today essentially to the theology of the Heidelberg (formerly Jena)
theolo-