# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1858_S301
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library.     301

-cient doctores in ecclesia [teachers in the church] were not set aside altogether like schoolboys by the great scholarship of today and of yesterday.

Although, as I have already remarked above, I do not write this on the occasion of your book*), it nevertheless grieves me sincerely that it is you in particular who have fallen into such a breach with our church — you, whom, along with me, many revere as a theologian at once so learned and so heartfelt a Lutheran.

Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library.

(Continued.)

4. The fourth branch of the so-called practical theological disciplines is formed by pastoral theology in the narrower sense. As concerns this part of sacred divinity, our church possesses a standard work. It is the following: "M. Conradi Portae Pastorale Lutheri, that is, Useful and Necessary Instruction on the Foremost Matters of the Holy Ministry. Gathered from God's Word and Dr. M. Luther's Writings for the Use of Aspiring Preachers and Church Servants. Published with Annotations by M. Joh. Christoph Cramer. Jena, 1729." Octavo. The author of this work, Conr. Porta, born in 1541 at Osterwick in the Principality of Halberstadt, was early left an orphan of both father and mother, but clung all the more eagerly, already in his youth, to his heavenly Father, and so, since he showed outstanding gifts as well, soon found the necessary support to enable him, after he had laid the first foundation of his knowledge in the school of his native town, to attend also the Latin schools at Quedlinburg and Eisleben. Already in 1562, while still a student at the Gymnasium in the latter town, he came into possession of Luther's works, read them with great eagerness, and so laid, already there, the foundation of that sound, genuinely Lutheran theology which later so distinguished him. He pursued his academic studies at Rostock, where he became a Magister legens [lecturing master]. After later administering a rectorship at Osterwick and a co-rectorship at Eisleben, he became, in this latter place, a deacon in 1569 and then, in 1575, pastor and consistorial assessor, in which capacity he still had to give lectures at the local Gymnasium.**) His death followed already in the year 1585. Porta was in

*) It is indeed a very bad thing that a man like the Gotha court preacher Schwarz has been able to say, in his History of the Newest Theology, p. 369: "What has Thomasius's modernized theology — which in its consequences falls prey to the most dangerous rationalism — in common with genuine Lutheranism?" It is likewise a bad thing that the acute Dorner, who calls himself "no advocate of the inerrancy of the C.-F. [Formula of Concord]," has been able to demonstrate to you (see Jahrbücher, etc., vol. I, part II, p. 338) that what you call the proper, consistent further development of the doctrine of the church is precisely what the C.-F. [Formula of Concord] rejects,

**) This function entrusted to him was the occasion for the famous Oratio continens adhortationem ad lectionem scriptorum Lutheri [Oration Containing an Exhortation to the Reading of Luther's Writings], 1584, which school-oration von der Hardt had reprinted again in the year 1708 as a "praeclarum opusculum" [a splendid little work].