# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1860_S57
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How It Is Wrongheaded to Present the Christian Doctrine of Faith as a System, Etc. 57

-torical research, and cannot itself be finished before that research is concluded. This kind of systematic treatment, which we shall call the empirical kind, is accordingly likewise applicable only to a portion of empirical material, and is modified somewhat with each different material, according to the nature of the empirical sources of knowledge proper to that material.

"Fundamentally different from it, however, is that manner of system-building which has hovered before the speculative philosophers of every age: proceeding from some simplest thing, they wished, by rejecting all empirical evidence, to let a system of knowledge arise out of that simplest thing through its own self-unfolding, in the hope that the inviolable necessity of this process of unfolding would give to such a system and to its individual propositions such correctness and certainty that it would afterward not only agree with everything that experience lets us know, but would also first supply the true key to empirical knowledge itself. These philosophers have been at odds over what the simplest starting point should be posited as, and over how the process of unfolding must proceed in order to yield that inviolable necessity — whether it is to be conceived as a logical process, or as a dialectical development, or as a more substantial self-unfolding. But the thought common to them all has always been that out of some simplest thing a closed whole of knowledge should be derived and should unfold, by necessity and with disregard of all experience, in order afterward to prove itself by experience. It needs no demonstration that this speculative kind of system-building, which on principle disregards experience, is something wholly different from that first kind, which proceeds merely from an arrangement of empirically gained knowledge corresponding to its material. If we now consider both of these in their relation to the doctrine of salvation, it is beyond doubt to me that the speculative method is applicable to it neither wholly nor by half, since God has revealed his salvation historically in word and deed, and therefore also wills that it be known by us in an empirical way. On the other hand, it is just as certain and self-evident that I hold the first, empirical, kind of systematic treatment to be applicable to the doctrine of salvation — indeed, that it appears to me applicable to the doctrine of salvation more than to anything else in the world, because the words and works of God for salvation certainly form in themselves a harmonious whole. This, indeed, is the method of which all Christian dogmaticians of every age have made use. Only, for that very reason, I insist, together with all these dogmaticians, that the laws of this method must also be kept, so that the formation of Christian systematic theology may proceed only vis-à-vis the empirical evidence proper to it. And indeed, the sources of knowledge proper to it (?) will consist in Holy Scripture, in subjective experience of faith, and in the doctrine of the church, so that each of these three is to be used according to its own nature. When I now compared with this von H.'s demands for a system, there lay, without doubt, in his own statements