# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1860_S111
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Foundations of Schenkel's Christian Dogmatics as Set Forth from the Standpoint of Conscience, etc. 111

be immaterial at one moment, so that spirit can act upon it, and then at
the same time material again, so that it can convey the action of spirit to
matter. But something that was at once material and immaterial cannot
exist, because this would involve a contradiction in itself."

Thoroughly rationalistic is what Schenkel says of man's original
perfection. E[rlangen] C[ritique] 284: "It is not in personality as such
alone, but in the personality — placed, together with its bodily
organization, under the thoroughgoing rule of spirit, and realizing this
rule in every direction and at every moment of the manifestation of
life — that the image of God in man comes to true, comprehensive
self-realization" (II, 108). P. 280: "And so long as human personal life is,
in this predominantly spirit-like manner, such that soul and body — that
is, the life of sensation and of matter — obey the impulses of spirit
without resistance and unconditionally, so long is it as it ought to be; it
then corresponds perfectly to its purpose. Man is in this case normal, or
whole." The rationalists teach exactly the same thing; for example
Bretschneider says of the first man: "his reason was able to exercise and
maintain dominion over all natural drives, and the natural drives, or the
faculty of desire and feeling, stood in so happy an equilibrium as served
their guidance by reason" (Br. Dogm. II, 70). The only difference is that
Schenkel clothes his meager rationalistic thoughts in the high-flown
phrase-jingling of modern scholarliness, in order to give them a somewhat
more profound-seeming veneer.

Since Schenkel promises to write a dogmatics from the standpoint of
conscience, one might suppose that he would at least draw somewhat
nearer to Scripture in his demonology and doctrine of sin. But there he
sinks even beneath the most vulgar rationalism. With the devil he makes
very short work indeed. "Conscience knows of no devil" — therefore
there is none: such, in all seriousness, is Schenkel's argument. The
Erlangen critique says, p. 285: "Spirit as such has in itself no occasion to
turn away from God" (II, 342); hence also "the fall into sin of a purely
spiritual personal being, standing outside all relatedness to the visible
world, is simply inconceivable" (II, 336). That there consequently can be
no devil either goes without saying. "Belief in the existence of absolutely
evil superterrestrial personal beings is grounded dogmatically, sufficiently,
neither by a deliverance of conscience nor of the divine Word, although
the demonic and satanic evil, as evil in the form of collective personality,
is indeed to be distinguished from the merely subjective evil, as evil in the
form of individual personality" (II, 238). To be sure, Satan is mentioned
very frequently in Holy Scripture; but "the Satan of the Old Testament is
nothing other than a prominent angel of misfortune or punishment, so to
speak the repre-