# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1861_S157
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary News. 157

Erlangen Theology. Dr. Schenkel is certainly the last man to grieve over a departure from the pure doctrine of the church, yet he is right, in any case, when he expresses indignation that so many theologians nowadays, who wish to be regarded and accepted as representatives of church doctrine, spread the worst false teachings under that very cover. We must therefore, however much we regret the secret malicious pleasure with which Schenkel indulges himself concerning Erlangen theology in his "Allgem. Zeitschrift," first number of this year, nevertheless declare his judgment on the whole to be correct, when he writes there as follows: "The most recent Erlangen theology has, precisely with regard to the most important points of doctrine, little claim to walking in the ways of the orthodox fathers. When the dogmaticians of the orthodox era ascribed to the person of Christ, for Protestantism, the nature of true and eternal Godhead, they meant this expression in the fullest earnest; they would have believed themselves guilty of an outrage against the divine majesty itself, had they withdrawn from the Godhead of Christ even the least particle of what belongs to God's own being. Now it belongs indisputably to God's being that God is unbounded, infinite, perfect, and in particular that he is unchangeable. The Erlangen theologians would doubtless earnestly protest against any comparison with the Rationalists, but what right have they, then, from their own standpoint, to teach the Godhead of Christ as a matter of principle? Hofmann quite openly sets forth that the Son of God "passed out of the state of world-ruling power and will into the human limitation of existence, knowledge, and power," and yet the same is supposed, in this human limitation, not to have ceased to be true and eternal God! Whoever can teach something so full of contradiction, without the slightest trace of scientific hesitation or moral scruple, thereby proves at the very least that the preconditions for coherent, honest, consistent thinking have either always been lacking in him, or have been lost with time." With this Schenkel exercises a criticism of Hofmann's theological system which, although not itself theological, is perhaps the most sensitive one for Hofmann, since it is precisely there that he seeks his strength surpassing all others — to be able to write a "coherent, consistent" system of theology — and since in any case it is the interest of consistency that is the reason why our dear Lord Jesus Christ, in Hofmann's system, must be such a humanly limited God. Schenkel continues: "If it is true, as Dr. Hengstenberg asserts against Thomasius — and it is true — that the very thing is declared by him to have been temporarily set aside which, according to all Christian conceptions of God, belongs indispensably to the being of God, then Thomasius has, in a way that admits no contradiction, given up the Godhead of Christ, and has scientifically sunk down to the very standpoint of the rationalism which he professes to abhor so thoroughly. In vain do we look about us at present for a fully substantial, unassailably consistent orthodoxy that believes in itself. There are only claims to being orthodox. The doctrine of the person of Christ, this central doctrine of the Christian faith, has become a stumbling-block for those who wish to spoil things neither with modern scholarship nor with modern churchliness." — Sad, sad, that the so-called orthodox should have to hear so bitter a truth spoken of them by the Unionists — and must remain silent.

A Death. On March 20 there died at Dresden the royal cabinet minister, retired, and dean of the cathedral chapter of Meißen, Count Detlev von Einsiedel, after a short illness, in his eighty-third year — a man who throughout his life, even in times of the deepest falling-away, faithfully confessed his Lord and Savior in word and deed, at the cost of much reproach.

The number of Jesuits at the end of last year was 7,144, of whom 2,939 were priests, 2,159 were engaged in teaching, and 2,046 were coadjutors. In the course of fifteen years their number has increased by 2,292. In the year just past Germany counted 527 and America 444 Jesuits.

"Chiliasm and the Pulpit." Under this title there is an article