# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S38
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

38 Preface to the 1862 Volume.

1860, p. 241 ff.) So writes a man who himself passes the following judgment on the theology of our time: "Hand in hand with the dilettantish versatility and mobility of our scholarship goes a lack of a sense for truth and of common sense, of logical energy, of originality of conception, of a metallic cast to its presentation — which surely belongs among the troubling signs of the age. Our theology is entering its Alexandrian period." (Ibid., p. 247.) At this we must cry out: "If they do this in the green wood, what shall be done in the dry?" If a Lutheran theologian of our time, such as Kahnis, declares that the old Lutheran theology, as regards the articles of the inspiration of Scripture, of the Trinity, of the person of Christ, of the working of the sacraments, of original sin, and of free will, stands in need of a reformation, then what will we still have left to seek of the old Lutheran theology in the writings of our newer theologians? At most a few building stones; the edifice itself has been torn down. Now we certainly wish to rejoice heartily, and we have always rejoiced heartily, wherever we find that the newer theologians have better dressed and more rightly fitted in some old golden, silver, or diamond building stone; but in the whole new structure, with its foundation partly shaken and its walls in great part built up of wood, hay, and stubble, we can never dwell; and by God's preserving grace no one will move us to abandon the old building, in which our soul has found security from God's wrath, judgment, and hell, and from the driving winds of manifold and strange doctrines.

After Pastor Fengler, in Ehlers's periodical, made the charge against us Missourians that we furnish "comparatively little that is our own," that we do not "create," he bursts into these words: "Thank God that things stand better after all in Germany, and among us too.. Thank God. A new journal has recently been founded among us. And even our opponents will have to say that most of what it contains has hand and foot." To this we must answer that we readily grant to the writers in Germany, including many in the Prussian Lutheran church, the honor of being more learned and more brilliant writers, in whose written productions more splendid gifts are mirrored than those with which we poor Missourians, in our meager beginnings, have been endowed. We do not seek to hide this from ourselves, nor are we filled with envy on perceiving the low rung on which we stand below Germany in this respect; rather, we hold the great gifts granted to our fatherland's church in high honor and esteem, and rejoice in them as gifts that adorn the body of which we are members. But we must still ask: what is the fruit of this, that our fatherland's church, to be sure, does not deserve the reproach of having furnished "comparatively little that is its own," of not having "created"? — Scarcely any theological schools have survived; as many theologians as Germany has, so many theologies it has