# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1860_S113
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Foundations of the Schenkelian [Dogmatics], from the Standpoint of Conscience, etc. 113

is a pure spirit-being, but still has a psychic-bodily natural organism.
Through this psychic-bodily natural organism sin is mediated. For every
sin always proceeds from a sensuous stimulus (II, 341), and this stimulus
to sin, being itself a sensuous one, naturally proceeds from the material
creation (II, 337). Through the material creation, then, sensuous
excitements of desire arise in man; now if the spirit does not master
these sensuous excitements of desire through the consciousness of its
higher being, of its likeness with God, the absolute Spirit, but instead
becomes enervated, and, unmindful of its fellowship with God, surrenders
itself to them and lets them rule over it, it thereby becomes sinful and
lost. Sin is therefore to be understood "in its possibility as a product
of the mighty world-stimulus, in its actuality as a consequence of
partially enervated activity of the spirit" (II, 344, 345).. "Some
passages of Schenkel's dogmatics now seem to us to have to be understood
as meaning that their author explains the possibility of the spirit's
being overgrown by matter from the fact that the human spirit was not
present in sufficient abundance and strength to hold down the matter
rising up against it. These are, in particular, the following passages,
which treat of the communication of salvation to man once he has become
sinful: "in that God communicates himself to man by virtue of his
spirit-being, he communicates to him what man originally already has,
only not yet in that fullness and vigor which he needs for his
salvation" (I. 30); further: "were God able to communicate nothing at
all of his personal fullness of being to man, then it would be, etc."
(I, 33); further: "the Christian dogmatician must proceed from the
presupposition — — that the human spirit, having become abnormal — —,
cut off from connection with the primal source of the divine life of the
spirit, would be helplessly left to languish and hopelessly perish —
that would be its lot" (I, 28); finally a passage (I. 49), where Schenkel
speaks of a, "though ever so slowly advancing, yet steady divine
increase of spirit," in mankind's need of redemption."

P. 288: "Now that we have seen what Schenkel says about the lostness
and the need for salvation of man, and how this need for salvation is
to be met by a "divine increase of spirit," a "divine communication of
spirit" — and indeed by a divine communication of spirit which, since
the time when the need for salvation began, has "stood still for a
moment" [i.e. paused] (II, 48 ff.) —, we may fairly express our fear
that in Schenkel's dogmatics the work of reconciliation and redemption
of Jesus Christ will not find the central and fundamental place which,
according to the experience of every Christian, it occupies."

The reader sees from what has been communicated how, in Schenkel, rationalistic