# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1860_S17
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Theology Then and Now. 17

views must serve as a witness; indeed, an attempt has even been made to
turn him in this way into a Pietist, or even into a Rationalist.

That many learned and unlearned people nowadays regard themselves
as Luther's masters is proved by the many disparaging judgments, the
occasional insinuations and side-thrusts, which work all the more harm
among the unlearned the more such critics of Luther know how to give
themselves the appearance of being otherwise his greatest admirers. To
such I would like to make the following offer. If they can show me that
they have so studied the whole of Luther's writings that they can give an
account, on everything belonging to the several disciplines, of where and
how Luther speaks of it, and if they next demonstrate that they have made
their own, as far as possible, all the good in Luther's doctrine and manner
of teaching that they themselves recognize as good, then I will also enter
into negotiation with them over Luther's supposed faults, and I am
convinced in advance, from my own experience, that in most cases they
will take back their judgments, or at least soften them, and will regard
such trifles as individual grains of sand in a good loaf of bread, which one
removes without thereby spoiling one's enjoyment of the bread. Oh, how
happy we would be if in the writings of the more recent theologians in
particular no more such grains of sand were found than one finds, say, in
the writings of Luther!

4. Formerly one had fewer books and an easier time of study; now
the vast number of books makes study ever harder. — It is among the
unrecognized blessings of the Reformation that the Church was thereby
freed from a great burden of books and instead blessed with the writings
of Luther and others, through which the tree of Holy Scripture won
leaves again and bore rich fruit. Should these not still have the same
power now, if they were diligently studied and used? To be sure, our
time is not so favorable to this as the time of the Reformation was, in
that in the countless books that have appeared, especially in the last
100 years,

what Luther had planted was uprooted, and what he had uprooted was
planted again. While most books themselves, along with their authors,
from the last few decades are already forgotten, of Luther's books the
words of the first Psalm still hold true: His leaf also shall not wither.

The number of books that is now required for a thorough and
comprehensive study of theology is so great, and keeps increasing so
much, that often the study of a single discipline alone would require the
lifespan of Methuselah. What in the time of the Reformation and soon
after still resembled a snowball has now become an avalanche. Whoever,
for instance, wishes to study Paul's epistle to the Ephesians thoroughly
and from every side must first work independently through all the rules
of grammatical-historical interpretation; then, besides the so-called
introductory writings, he must go through the commentaries on the whole
New Testament from the church fathers down to the most recent
exegetes, and that too, for the sake of the fashionable