# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1894_S49
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1894. 49

highest principle, but must lay out the factual content of Christianity itself as it is summed up in principle. As such a genetic principle Luther designates the article of justification by faith!" That Luther says all articles stand and fall with that on justification is true and Luther said it; but nowhere is Luther's doctrine a genetic development out of the believing consciousness. Luther cannot be made a Schleiermacherian, still less the father of the Schleiermacher-Luthardtian genetic theory of development. Luther drew every doctrine out of Scripture and through Scripture, and thereby he gave the ossified scholasticism the blow which the enthusiasts also want to praise in Schleiermacher. This much is certain: in the genetically developing consciousness-theology that wants to be Christian we have to do not with a work of the Holy Spirit but with a monstrous product of the most dangerous enthusiasm. —

2. The Systematizing Enthusiasm.

By this we mean the so-called theology which puts all weight on the system; which makes the consistency of the system a condition of satisfactory theology. Systematizing enthusiasm sees only in the right system a truly worthy, profound and scientific theology; in reality it makes the system just as much the measure of what a piece of true theology can be and in what formulation it can be so, as the source of what a necessary piece of true theology must be, and in what indispensable scope.

Our old men, the dogmaticians of our Church, also built systems, but they were not system-riders. With them theology was a descriptive science, if we may for once use the proscribed expression rightly. When a church teacher sits at his Bible and, for example, reads the article on the creation of the world, and seeks for it the other Bible passages that also speak of the same matter, and then repeats and writes down what the Scripture says to us, that surely does not displease God. We may also gather and put together on one heap the glorious jewels that lie in various places in the beautiful casket of Scripture. That is the modest system-making of our old men. As soon as one goes further, wants to establish a connection that God has not made, and on it even to build a basic system with the help of reason or philosophy, that is reprehensible enthusiasm. This appears in two forms, namely

a. as strictly systematizing enthusiasm. That is systematizing in its developed full form. Either