# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1860_S58
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

the sense that the empirical kind of systematic treatment does not seem to him scholarly enough, but that he recommends the path of speculative system-building. For he seeks a simplest thing as a starting point, which is supposed to unfold itself, from which everything is supposed to be derived with inviolable necessity, whereby Scripture and church doctrine are to be disregarded — yet what results will coincide with what is afterward to be compared with it. Of all this, of these categories of necessity, self-unfolding, and derivation, the empirical kind of systematic treatment knows nothing; but the speculative kind not only knows of them, it has its very essence in them. On the other hand, however, von H. now places his simplest thing in a fact, and facts, after all, are simply not suited to unfold themselves into a system, are simply not suited to serve as the starting point of speculative treatment, as everyone knows who understands such matters. Hence I said: von H. applies the strictly speculative method of system-building to the doctrine of salvation, which is not permissible, and thereby comes all the less to his goal, since he moreover, in a manner incompatible with this method, takes his starting point from a fact.

"Now, what has von H. replied to this? Well, he simply represents the state of affairs as though I wanted no systematic theology at all, and as though he himself wanted nothing but scholarship and systematic theology in the most innocent, traditional manner. I have, he reports of me, an objection against his systematics, that it is too strict and too new for me, that I want only an "arbitrary" ordering of the doctrinal material; that if I will not hear of any "necessity," then of course I want "caprice"; and he does not rightly know whether I allow a systematic theology to exist at all, by right. For his own part, on the other hand, he points out that Augustine and Athanasius too "set the task of their systematic activity strictly enough for themselves"; he "does not, however, deny that he has sharpened the requirement placed on the systematician" (merely sharpened it) "has"; but still, what he demands does not, after all, lie "too far" from the task Thomasius set himself. And then, quasi re bene gesta, he takes, as is his habit, a very full mouth, and says that my misgivings do not amount to much. The intention behind all this is now clear enough: with those outbursts he opens his reply; and since his whole reply seems calculated chiefly for readers who have not read my treatise, such readers can now, on the very first three pages, have it in black and white that von H., as the bearer and representative of scholarship, has been attacked by me as an idiotic despiser of it, because he has gone unappreciated and misunderstood. The pity is only that none of this is true. It is not true, what he testifies of himself: his systematics is not essentially the same as the scholarliness of Augustine, for the issue is not the strictness or non-strictness of the scholarly requirements, but rather concerns a deriving and a letting-oneself-unfold-of-its-own-accord by necessity and with disregard of Scripture — of which Augustine and the like knew not one