# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1860_S112
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

sentative of the office of punishing angel (II, 268), and it is not easy to
find "a result of the biblical theology of the Old Testament more firmly
established than that it does not even presuppose a somewhat developed
satanology and demonology" (II, 269). For the doctrine of the devil and
the demons as absolutely evil spirit-beings first arose in the time of the
exile; only in the doctrinal circle of the Alexandrian-Jewish school does
the devil appear as the prince of the world of evil spirits (II, 270). But if
the devil does occur variously in the New Testament as well, this is to be
explained by the fact "that the Lord, in a parabolic manner of teaching,
personifies evil" (II, 274). — These doctrines about the devil might well
seem almost an anachronism!"

In our conviction, these doctrines about the devil prove that Schenkel
has no conscience. For if Schenkel had but a spark of conscience, he
would say: the existence of the devil is, to be sure, established with
sunlike clarity in the Bible, but I do not believe it. Instead, Schenkel has
the effrontery to tell the lie that the Word of God does not establish belief
in the existence of evil angels, and seeks to prove this by the most
senseless assertions. For he declares "the demonic or satanic evil to be
evil in the form of collective personality." Now it is well known that
personality, or the property of being personal, can inhere only in
individual subjects, for personality consists precisely in this, that a
subject possesses self-consciousness and by virtue of it recognizes itself
as a particular I and distinguishes itself from others. The truth of this
proposition is acknowledged by every rational person — only not by
Schenkel. He vindicates to all devils a collective personality!? With the
same right he could also maintain that all men have a collective nose, or
that all donkeys have a collective head; this nonsense would still not be as
mad as his monstrous explanation that all devils have a collective
personality, and that by this Scripture means only the satanic evil.

If Schenkel further says that the Old Testament does not even
presuppose a somewhat developed satanology, he thereby only issues
himself the sad testimony that he is wholly spiritually blind and has read
the Old Testament without any sense or understanding. In repeating the
miserable lie that the doctrine of the devil first arose in the time of the
exile — so that the Jews are supposed to have adopted it from the
Babylonians!? — he thereby not only blasphemes the Word of God, but
also sinks even below Bretschneider, the notorious representative of the
most common rationalism, who still finds this assertion "very doubtful."

In Schenkel's remarks on sin it is remarkable that not the slightest
moral element is found in them, not even the faintest inkling that sin is a
falling away from God, a transgression of his law. To him it is nothing
more than a mechanical natural process. Erlangen critique 285: "Man
could only sin because he did not yet have any