# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1894_S46
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

46 Proceedings of the fifteenth convention

comes of itself, as Schleiermacher's pantheism brings with it. — How much Schleiermacher plays a repulsive juggling with his talk of Word, Scripture, original testimony of Christ in the Gospel, one sees from his disparaging remarks on the Old Testament. § 132: This (the Old Testament) does not equal the New Testament in dignity and spirit. It is also quite dispensable for our pious consciousness. Did Christ, the Son of God, ever speak so contemptuously of the Old Testament? — Schleiermacher says further: It is not so "that we still need for our faith these anticipations (prophecies), since we have experience, and the New Testament Scripture approves that one ceases to believe on account of such testimonies." And this is supposed to stand in John 4:42, where the Samaritans say to the woman: We believe no longer because of your word, we have now heard for ourselves. These speeches of Schleiermacher's were not taught him by the Pentecostal Spirit, who spoke nothing but prophecies out of St. Peter, but by the enthusiast spirit, which in all enthusiasts deals very frivolously with Scripture. According to Scripture it says: Faith comes from preaching, and preaching from the Word of God; according to the enthusiasm of Schleiermacher it says: Faith comes from preaching, preaching from the congregational spirit. In short, the so-called theology of a Schleiermacher is enthusiasm, because as a means for the imparting of the Spirit it does not acknowledge Scripture, as God demands John 20:31. It was good to show this on the road taken so far, since now Schleiermacher's propositions on theology and dogmatics, in which he openly declares his enthusiasm in positive terms, can be understood at once in their full content. Theology is, according to Schleiermacher, "the sum of all those kinds of knowledge and rules of art without whose possession and use a harmonious leadership of the Christian Church, that is, of the Christian church government, is not possible." (Theol. Werke I, § 5). How, then, does one come into possession of theology? That theology is a habitus worked only by the means of Holy Scripture, through which a man of God is equipped for every good work, Schleiermacher naturally says nothing, for his whole speculative-enthusiast system rejects it. According to him the way to theology is membership in the Church and thereby fellowship in her common spirit. Schleiermacher's Church, however, has (§ 6) as its basis piety, which is nothing other than the feeling of absolute dependence (I, §§ 14 and 15). This shifting of religion, of faith and of piety into feeling has been exalted to heaven by the Schleiermacherian enthusiasts. A Gass writes (Herzog, Encyclopädie p. 575): "Above all it was the derivation from the essence of piety by which a quickening element was to penetrate in the midst of the merely doctrinaire" (that is, doctrinal) "modes of treatment to the right and to the left." That means