# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1858_S321
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume IV.    November 1858.    No. 11.

Ströbel and "Lehre und Wehre."

In the fourth quarterly number of the current volume of the Rudelbach-Guericke journal there appears a review, submitted by Lic. Ströbel, of our theological journal, Volumes I, II, and III (up to the March number). We cannot pass over this review in silence; all the less so since it expresses not only approval but also censure, and neither, coming from the mouth of a man like Ströbel, can be a matter of indifference to us. We therefore consider ourselves obliged to give the readers of our journal an account of both, and, where it seems necessary, to add at the same time a clarifying and corrective remark.

After giving an excerpt from the program of "Lehre und Wehre," he continues as follows:

"By these indications, then, the paper wishes to be judged. In "the exhibiting, seizing, and defending of the old treasures of the church" lies its foremost purpose, as also its characteristic difference from Germany's "theological journals," and not less its essential merit over very many of the latter — namely over all those which wish to be "believing," or even "Lutheran," and yet build, not on the rock of the Reformation, but on the sand of their own subjectivity. "Lehre und Wehre," in the noblest sense, is a journal of evangelical-Reformation reproduction. It does not wish, like most of its German colleagues, to erect cathedrals with proud walls and pinnacles, nor even to haul up sturdy material for such new buildings; its proper purpose is only, first, to dig up again the old granite foundations, relentlessly to clear away the hundred-year rubble of the age of Enlightenment and Folly — and this purpose is eminently practical and ought to be pursued by us Germans as well. But no; we distinguished German idealist-dreamers must of course know better than the American bush-theologians! With us, every theology student is, even often before completing his three years' course, a made, ecclesiastically-, believingly-, Lutheranly productive man, built up, and therefore at once building further himself on the foundation of a "Lutheran" theology which is entirely finished off in the childish: Once upon a time there was a man called Dr. Martin Luther. — That such Luth-