# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1860_S146
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

146 The Lutheran Church and the Union.

regard the union of churches as admissible, and, when occasion offered, to strive for it.

Finally, the Union is also the interest of the so-called "believing" or "mediating" theologians. It arose out of the undertaking to arrive at faith from within rationalistic theology itself, by way of ratiocination — thus not in a break with it, but in acknowledgment of its foundation, following its own method, taking its stand with it on one and the same ground of scholarship. The essence of mediating theology is, accordingly, the unbroken thread by which it proceeds out of rationalistic and pantheistic theology and philosophy. As a result, it is also, in many respects, still permeated and borne along by rationalistic and pantheistic elements. The scholarly axioms and concepts, the scholarly basic view and scholarly method of Rationalism and Pantheism, come to stand beside Holy Scripture for it as a second highest, or even as a still higher, principle. Namely, it therefore has, more or less, the presupposition and requirement that theology, in order to be scholarly, must derive the whole doctrine of religion from a single thought by logical necessity. Through this the logical interest — both the closed deduction and the mastery through general categories and the reduction to general categories — comes forward so strongly in it that the abstract thoughts of scholarship, and the subsuming of the material under them, are to it a concern no less than the realities of divine revelation. From this there then results a stunting, peculiar to it, of the biblical doctrines. Resting precisely on this, it lays claim for itself, preferentially if not exclusively, to the character of scholarly theology, and grants this, at least to its full measure, neither to the old Lutheran dogmaticians nor to the churchly theology of the present." As the originator and most prominent representative of this tendency Stahl names Schleiermacher. After Schleiermacher there followed, on the one hand, his own school, and on the other, the theology which is now preferentially called "mediating theology," or perhaps also "believing theology." "In its most prominent and most positive representatives (Nitzsch, J. Müller, etc.) it arrives at a truly evangelical doctrine of faith. But in general there clings to its standpoint, and runs through its achievements, that influence of rationalistic-pantheistic philosophy. Now this mediating philosophy, which undertakes to unite the antithesis between Christian faith and unbelieving philosophy, can find no difficulty at all in the antitheses between Lutheran and Reformed doctrine, which, in proportion to it, are the most trifling of trifles. It has, however, a pressing interest in the Union. Through the Union a striking example is given that, concerning dogmas hitherto held to be of the highest importance, divergent doctrines are recognized as admissible and equally warranted. From the Union, therefore, and as included within it, it draws the principle of the general admissibility and equal warrant of divergent doctrines.