# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S34
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

34 Preface to the 1862 Volume.

now put forward as doctrines of our church teachings against which our church, in its Symbols and in the writings of its best sons, has fought with all its might as against antichristian errors, and with what unfeigned disgust are now doctrines rejected as thoroughly unlutheran, unchurchly, fanatical or even papist false teachings, which are nevertheless fundamental doctrines of the Lutheran Reformation of the church! What labor, then, will it yet cost before the pure doctrine, as it was again brought to light three hundred years ago, becomes once more the common property, even merely in point of knowledge, of the leading Lutheran theologians alone! What a change must first take place before our Lutheran theologians and preachers as a whole consider it even worth the trouble to acquire Luther's writings at least, and to study them! What a dreadful sign it is of this age — which has admittedly awakened to something better — that thousands of copies of the Erlangen edition of Luther's works are moldering unsold in the warehouse, and that the work, for want of demand, still remains unfinished! In vain do men like Thomasius write: "We have for some time now, and rightly, begun again to go back to our older dogmaticians; but we would do well to immerse ourselves still more than hitherto in the man in whose heart the blood of the evangelical faith pulsed warmest and most vividly; from Luther, it seems to me, there is still infinitely much to be gained for the revival and refreshment of our dogmatics, of which it has recently been said, 'that it is beginning to grow somewhat cold.'" (Christ's Person and Work. Part One. pp. V-VI.) In vain does a man like Rudelbach bear this testimony: "Luther recapitulates in himself more than half a millennium, and at the same time preforms the secular development of the age to come." (Zeitschrift, 1857, p. 381.)

We are by no means blind and unthankful toward the by no means inconsiderable yield of the untiring labor of our age, even in the theological field. We value, and hold worthy and high, what has in recent times been accomplished for a better knowledge of the sacred languages, for the elucidation of church history, and for the solution of exegetical difficulties, *) and so forth. No one can perceive and make his own, with greater gratitude and more heartfelt joy, every new, deeper grounding and further correct development of an old truth from Scripture, than we ourselves. Nonetheless, we most often find occasion to be alarmed at precisely the "creative activity" of our age. What is recommended to us as a new discovery we find for the most part of a very doubtful, suspicious character; indeed, all too often we meet in it nothing other than an old error in a new garment, a newly decked-out, long-refuted teaching, once condemned by the church

*) Although even a Winer himself must confess: "The dispute among the exegetes has usually led back again to the understanding which the Protestant church earlier (in its beginning period) held fast, rather than forward to the correct one." (Grammar, etc., 3rd ed., Preface.)