# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S119
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

New Literature. 119

peoples and press all their strength into her service, while theology of every kind is splintered and divided, though by its calling and its subject matter it ought to unite in the one salvation appointed for all peoples. That is a very pitiable and dispiriting sight, one that will truly not encourage anyone to entrust himself to the tangled errors of theological scholarship; and it will help little to complain of the diminishing scientific sense after one has oneself contributed so abundantly to it."

New Literature.

Among our literary notices, the first volume of the "Lutheran Dogmatics" of Dr. K. F. A. Kahnis, Professor of Theology at Leipzig, was already announced earlier; it appeared last year with Dörffling & Francke in Leipzig. In the "Theologische Zeitschrift" of Dieckhoff and Kliefoth in Mecklenburg, in last year's December number, the first part of a searching critique from the pen of the first-named editor has appeared, from which we communicate the following to our readers. "In this book," Dieckhoff begins, "Dr. Kahnis carries out his falling away from the truth of the Lutheran confession — a falling away clearly enough announced already earlier (in 'The Inner Course of German Protestantism,' 2nd ed., 1860). This is an event which Lutheran theology cannot pass over in silence. It is a grave scandal when a theologian who for a time, and indeed in a prominent way, upheld the confession of our church and its rights, now, at a time when the cause of the Lutheran confession and the Lutheran church is once again sorely beset, falls away from it, and condemns as false what he formerly defended." Further down it says: "We may withdraw ourselves the less from such a strict examination of Dr. Kahnis's theology, the less we can conceal from ourselves — and this indeed as a mitigating circumstance to be taken into account in judging Dr. Kahnis — that he by no means stands entirely isolated, with certain fundamental flaws of his theology, within the so-called Lutheran theology of the last decades; and the less, on the other hand, we may any longer fail to acknowledge the fact that Lutheran theology as a whole has been placed in a new time of testing and sifting, in which it must, down to its ultimate grounds and foundations, prove itself anew, and bring itself to bear in the strength of the surely grounded truth of the Gospel." "Dr. Kahnis has a right to this, that no one call into question the subjective honesty in his theological developments; and we, who see the ground of his theological changes in the uncertainty of the foundations and method of his theology, are far from entertaining that doubt