# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1860_S56
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

56

How Wrong It Is
to Present Christian Doctrine as a System of Speculation.

Among the objections that Dr. Kliefoth raises, in his "Kirchliche Zeitschrift," against v. Hofmann's "Schriftbeweis," one not unimportant one is this: that in it Christian doctrine is presented as a system of speculation. Von Hofmann declares this objection to be altogether unwarranted, appealing to the systematic presentation of dogma that, for instance, an Athanasius, an Augustine, and the Lutheran dogmaticians have given. This has moved Kliefoth to express himself further on the matter in his journal (the April and May number of last year). From it we gladly share a few things, all the more so since that manner of treatment which turns Christianity into a philosophy is now the dominant one:

Kliefoth writes, in the passage cited, as follows:

"As I understand it, v. H. promises us, in the connection here under discussion, the following: starting from the fact of his Christianity, brought to its simplest self-statement, he wishes to derive from it, with unbreakable necessity and with complete disregard not only of church doctrine but also of Scripture, the whole of Christian doctrine; or, in other words: the said fact, by bringing itself to statement, is to be allowed to unfold itself into the whole of Christian doctrine, and that with unbreakable necessity and without anything being taken up from elsewhere. This is how I have understood v. H.'s intentions, and I have demonstrated, from his own statements, that I have understood him rightly in this.

"Now there are two ways of systematic treatment. The first aims merely at arranging its material together according to its nature. It is the kind applicable to empirical materials. Its characteristic feature therefore consists of two things: first, it must always work vis-à-vis this empirical material of its own; it can only arrange this empirical material of its own together by, at the same time, cognizing it empirically. Second, such an arranging-together of empirical materials can yield a whole closed in itself, a system, only when this material is itself, in itself, a whole. Whoever, for instance, writes the history of a human people will indeed also arrange his empirical material together, but that will not yield a system, since the history of a human people is in itself no harmonious whole, but rather only a piece out of the history of mankind, and is, moreover, itself torn apart by sin. Natural history, by contrast, and even larger divisions of natural history — zoology, botany, for instance — can already be treated systematically in this way, since the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom, as works of God, are presupposed to form in themselves a harmonious whole; from which, however, we at the same time also see that such a system must, above all, seek out its empirical sources and hold fast to them continually, proceeding only hand in hand with the empirical