# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S191
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary News. 191

to form Jerusalems out of it? The Lord God has pearl-stuff enough." On this
Hengstenberg makes the remark that this "biblical realism" has otherwise been
called Judaism, and adds: "One would hardly think it possible that a man who
has known the Holy Scriptures from his youth up could have no notion whatever
of poetry, as the author of this work has none — a man who is everywhere guided
by the opinion that one honors Holy Scripture by turning its sacred poetry,
steeped in deep and vital intuitions, into dry and commonplace prose. The
„„biblical realism“““ is in truth nothing else than a dry prosaism, and in many
cases is to be regarded no otherwise than if one wished to determine the
birthplace of the poet from the line „„I too was born in Arcadia.“““ To give a
coarser example, that is a biblical realism according to which neither Herod nor
Issachar was a man, but the former was a fox (Luke 13:32) and the latter a
bony ass (Genesis 49:14). Things have had to come to this pass, that in our age,
which so plumes itself on its learning, the chiliasts step forward and give out
for fidelity to Scripture what is nothing but an effrontery firmly founded on
ignorance in the matter of language. We must now cry out to them as Melanchthon
did to the sophists in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession: Sane bella est
interpretatio et digna istis contemtoribus studiorum eloquentiae — that is,
Truly it is a fine interpretation, and worthy of such despisers of the study of
eloquence! Art. XII. de poenitentia. p. 182. In their ignorance they suppose
that because Scripture is always to be understood literally, it is therefore
always to be understood in the proper (as opposed to figurative) sense! — With
regard to the proceedings on chiliasm at the last Prussian-Lutheran general
synod, Hengstenberg remarks: "The course of the affair at the synod has shown
sufficiently that the opposition would have done better not to raise it. Huschke's
influence succeeded in considerably weakening the originally far stronger draft
of a declaration of the synod against chiliasm" (which, so far as we know, was
edited by Pastor Brunn) "and so it has come about that in the synod's decree
gross chiliasm is indeed rejected, but the refined chiliasm — which, as was
shown at length earlier in these pages, is no less rejected in Art. 17 of the
Augsburg Confession than the gross — is declared churchly permissible, so that
the seventeenth article of the Augsburg Confession is partly abolished, to which
the synod had no right. The passage in question (of the general synod's
declaration), which in its tortuous expression recalls the Tridentinum, runs:
„„Whoever now confesses the seventeenth article of our Augsburg Confession thus
firmly and plainly with us, but at the same time believes that he must
understand chapter 20 of the Revelation of John and other prophetic passages
treating of the historical course of the kingdom of God through the world in
such a way that he looks for their fulfillment still in the future — his
orthodoxy is not to be suspected on account of such opinions.““ (It is evident
that if Hengstenberg recognizes in this formulation of a confession of the
seventeenth article of the Augsburg Confession the manner and style of the
Tridentine formulations, that is nothing less than an illusion of the senses.)

J. Köstlin has written a work: "Faith, its essence, ground and object, its
significance for knowledge, life and the church" (Gotha, 1859. 522 pp. large
8vo). In a review of this work Ströbel says, on the ground of citations given
from it: "Köstlin unmistakably finds accordingly the specific content of
Christian faith, of the fides salvifica, in the demands and commandments in
which the divine Creator reveals his will to men through the conscience. This
thought abolishes the whole of Christianity, because its distinguishing essence
consists in the gospel, of which the conscience, as the herald of the law and of
the law only, knows not the very least." — Here one has a fresh proof that in
Germany men go under the name of "believing learned theologians" whose theology
is absolutely nothing but philosophy, and who are yet blind enough to take it in
earnest for a mere further development and deeper conception of the old
Christian theology. How careful, then, must everyone be who looks through German
catalogues of the newer theological literature, that he does not place orders
on the strength of fine titles and famous names —