# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1858_S217
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Theological Faculty at Jena. 217

takes essentially the same position. The whole movement of theology and
church in the last forty years has essentially been ignored by this
school. Not progress but standstill is its banner. —

On one side of their banner stands "Progress," on the other:
"Scientific Rigor." We do not deny that among the older and newer
rationalists there have been, and still are, many very learned men who
have deserved well of scholarship; but rationalism as such — its basic
doctrines concerning God and man, concerning revelation and reason,
concerning Scripture and church — we charge with a want of scientific
rigor, whether it appeals now to sound common sense or to the results of
the latest philosophical inquiries. And remarkably, it is not only we
who bring this charge against it, but a still-living, distinguished
member of that very Jena faculty, Prof. Carl Hase, raised it publicly
more than twenty years ago in his theological polemical writings and
grounded it most tellingly. Hase, to be sure, replies that he meant only
rationalismus vulgaris, common rationalism; but now his own colleague
Rückert rises up against this and declares openly to the world: "common
and uncommon rationalism — we still find ourselves in the same essential
position as for a hundred years!" Now if common and speculative
rationalism are essentially the same, and if the former has been shown
by its own disciples to lack scientific rigor, then the latter at least
should not have the effrontery to claim the predicate of scientific
rigor for itself alone.

"By their fruits ye shall know them." What have been the fruits, for the
church and for the life of the people, of the movement that arose a
hundred years ago and in which the theological faculty at Jena still
stands today, and stands alone? Whoever stands in the midst of the
people and knows them, knows it, and it forces itself upon him daily:
rationalism has laid waste the church, broken its ordinances, thereby
thrown the people into confusion, taken from them love for the church,
for piety, for prayer, and with that destroyed the foundation of all
fidelity and all virtues; whatever good and Christian remains among the
people still stems from the remnants of the old faith. This judgment
sounds harsh, and may sound especially harsh to learned gentlemen who
bury themselves in their books and often know precious little of the
real conditions among the people. Let us therefore hear a man who, for
all his learning, knows well the life of the German people in the old
world and the new, and who has thought and written much about it — a
Swiss republican by birth, by no means a confessional but a very
"liberal-minded" theologian, the professor of theology at the
evangelical seminary at Mercersburg in Pennsylvania, Dr. Schaff. He
writes, in his book that appeared only this year,