# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1894_S38
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

38 Proceedings of the fifteenth convention

dissected it critically and philosophically and proclaimed his find as the key to the right life of faith and spirit. And since Schleiermacher performed his dialectical and speculative feats, over there they have known only the epoch-making Schleiermacher. All theology that he has not and has not brought to light counts for nothing, not even that of the Reformer of the Church.

One might think it a very unjustified accusation if one accuses Schleiermacher of enthusiasm. For in his Glaubenslehre [Christian Faith] Schleiermacher even gives testimony for the Word and against enthusiasm. He says II, § 108, 5: "In the first disciples both" (namely faith and conversion, which however mean something quite different with Schleiermacher from what we understand by them according to Scripture) "were effected by the Word in the wider sense, that is, by the whole prophetic activity of Christ. Continually, then, it is first of all the same divine power of the Word, the expression understood in the same extent, by which conversion is still effected now and faith arises." Thereupon Schleiermacher declares himself against the inner revelation of Christ in some without the Word, for that would make the appearance of Christ unnecessary, and adds: "This our assertion rests on the testimony of Scripture"; his ground for it being: "Not merely the intention to secure us against some enthusiasts. But we can see the danger of enthusiasm on this point completely only by means of this proposition." That has a somewhat Lutheran ring. The admirers of Schleiermacher, and to them belongs the whole swarm of the newer theologians after him, who date from him the solemnly confirmed charter of their theological arbitrariness — take such words seriously. We cannot. Schleiermacher is like a pyrotechnist. As a pyrotechnist lights up an interesting ruin with colored fires, so Schleiermacher presents the ruins of the doctrine of Scripture and of the Church in an interesting illumination. What Schleiermacher brings as doctrine of Scripture and of the Church is not the doctrine of Scripture and of the Church. They are ruins of it. And they do not stand there in Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre as objects of a holy, earnest interest, but as objects of dialectical art, of the steady, equally admirably innocently spun-out and finely drawn-out reinterpretation into their complete opposite. Other critics have received this impression too. Thus Flügel says (in: Speculative Theology of the Present, 1888): "And can one take evil more lightly at all than is done by Schleiermacher and Rothe?" (p. 420.) "But precisely this theoretical substructure is to blame that the theological ethics (moral doctrines) since Schleiermacher . . . are, by their whole artificial preparation, most unlike the ethics of Jesus Christ." — "Here one would like to give the preacher Saurin right