# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S33
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume VIII.    February 1862.    No. 2.

Preface to the 1862 Volume.

(Conclusion.)

Perhaps no one denies that the church of the present must ever appropriate to itself and preserve as a precious legacy what has already been granted by God's grace, in treasures of knowledge and in disclosures of the content of Scripture, to the church of the past, its mother. Has the church of our time then already appropriated everything that the church lying behind it has worked out through God's grace? — It is unfortunately a fact that only a few, even of those who wish to have a share in general in the building up of the church, so much as know the classical literature of our church in its most blessed days, in which its doctrine is most deeply grounded, most clearly developed, most strikingly defended, and the opposing error most powerfully disarmed and exposed in its nakedness — let alone that many should actually have studied these substantial theological works, or at least the one or another in each of the various disciplines that might serve as instar omnium among them, and made their own what is laid down therein. One contents oneself with having read this and that citation, perhaps even torn from its context, and then imagines oneself, in one's own cleverness, able to survey and criticize the whole edifice of doctrine. Most of the newer theologians evidently regard it as a chief task to present everything in an elevated philosophical language and according to a thoroughly abstract manner of viewing things, whereby often even their most trivial thoughts and their worst paralogisms appear as lofty wisdom. One consequence of this is, among other things, that many think that, once they can juggle the phraseology of the learned, they too now belong among the oracles of the age, and that especially the younger theologians feel a revulsion, as before some slovenly fare, toward the writings of our old teachers — thoroughly learned, yet withal humble, seeking only the edification of the church. Since they understand everything in them at once, according to the mere wording, they think that they too have long since known it all. Another consequence is that rationalists, such as a Carl Hase and a Benedict Winer, often know the doctrine of our church better and represent it more correctly than theologians who claim not merely, like those men, to report on it historically, but to reproduce it as its true representatives. With what boldness are