# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1860_S107
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Foundations of Schenkel's Christian Dogmatics as Set Forth from the Standpoint of Conscience, etc. 107

thering of their parishioners' spiritual welfare. These would more rightly
be called herdsmen of cattle than shepherds of souls.

We do not say this as though we absolutely and in itself disapproved of a
preacher's taking some care for his household (provided this happens
without harm to his office and his studies) — care spent on feeding the
livestock and tending the fields. But he should first and chiefly attend to
himself and to doctrine, and not labor anxiously and worriedly for the
sake of food and clothing, because God himself is our inheritance, who will
be field, vineyard, olive-grove, seed, land, and fruit to us all at once, and
because Christ will not allow that his servants should lack anything, Luke
22:36. Woe therefore to those drones who do not feed the flock but devour
it. These the prophet Ezekiel pierces through with the sword of his word,
Ezek. 34. For it is our task to seek not our own gain but the salvation of
the sheep, 2 Cor. 12:14: "I seek not yours, but you." We are appointed to
be fishers of men, not fishers of money. Therefore preachers, as Aquinas
aptly says, should have greater concern for the increase of the spiritual
goods in the congregation than for the acquisition of earthly goods. —


On the Foundations of Schenkel's Christian Dogmatics
as Set Forth from the Standpoint of Conscience.

Under this heading the Erlangen Journal for Protestantism and Church,
in its November 1859 issue, brings a critique of the first volume of the
work named. According to it, the foundation of Schenkel's dogmatics is
vulgar rationalism, which is just in the process of entering into an
amalgamation with pantheism — though it has succeeded so little at this
that at present the ingredients of the two mental aberrations still stand
rather unmixed side by side.

The old vulgar rationalism has outlived itself; that is a fact which it can
no longer deny itself. It no longer dares to commend to today's spirit of
the age its bare triad "God, virtue, and immortality" as the non plus
ultra of all wisdom in religion and philosophy. By doing so it would only
hasten its own fate: death by boredom. It therefore contemplates a
metamorphosis, in order thereby to make itself interesting to the public
again. Since pantheism is now the dominant intellectual current among
the educated, it has resolved to take a bath of rejuvenation therein, so as
to rise again, like a new phoenix, in witty, speculative, and aesthetic
beauty, and to make new conquests. Yet — the pigtail still hangs behind
it! In the midst of the strange pantheistic trimming there still peers out
at us