# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1858_S216
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

216 The Theological Faculty at Jena.

theologian Paulus, who explained away the miracles of the New Testament —
of the Halle theologian Wegscheider, who set up "sound reason" as the
supreme judge in matters of faith — of the Jena theologian Gabler, who
could not understand why the Gospel should be preached to the heathen —
of the Weimar general superintendent Röhr, who declared publicly that if
the people were to be told openly everything one believes (or does not
believe), one would need the fortune of a tax-farmer — we can go back
still further: it confesses itself essentially to the Enlighteners of
the previous century, Nicolai, Teller, Basedow, and so forth, whose
memory, as every unbiased person must admit, is a notorious one. But
they were all rationalists.

We do not wish here to dispute with the faculty over its theological
position. We wish to leave aside the relation in which it stands to the
public confession of faith of the Lutheran church (for whose protection
Jena was expressly founded), and to assume for the moment that it has
the right to take its stand on the ground of rationalism, and to
consider only what otherwise follows from that confession.

Those theologians whose cause Prof. Rückert represents — and the
Protestant Church Gazette on every page — otherwise explain the recent
turn in theology, and their abandonment of rationalism, as the effect of
the intimidating pressure of state power. The King of Prussia in
particular, and after him the majority of the Protestant princes of
Germany, out of fear of freer political and ecclesiastical views, are
said to have persecuted rationalism and favored the believing party,
calling more and more only opponents of the free movement to the
theological faculties and to influential positions in the church, so
that the younger generation grew timid and surrendered blindly to an
ecclesiastical reaction and its leaders. — If that were true, how could
it be explained that, as Prof. Rückert says, the same phenomenon repeats
itself "everywhere an evangelical church exists in the old world and the
new"? Who compelled the evangelical church in free Switzerland and in
free North America, who compelled it in Catholic France and in the
Russian Baltic provinces, to abandon rationalism and turn back again to
the faith of the fathers? That explanation does not hold — would that it
were never heard again! —

The battle-cry of rationalism has always been: "Progress." Here now we
have an open confession that for a hundred years it has not progressed,
but has remained essentially the same. We have long known and
maintained this, but we were contradicted, and referred to the newer
so-called speculative rationalism, which mediates between the old faith
and the present "consciousness of the age" and is supposed to be
progress — now we hear it from the very mouth of a rationalist, that the
newer as well as the older rationalism