# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1863_S55
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A New Homiletical Monthly. 55

through the blindness of their hearts." Those "noblest traits of character in man" have, through the fall, indeed been wholly abolished, and are by no means to be understood as expressions of a still-remaining divine, spiritual life. They are only the outer, hollow shells without the kernel — natural powers in man, just as among the animals too there are drives of affection, of friendship, of sociability. — Elsewhere Schaff preaches: "He (God) knows also the hidden longing of our heart for him, the thirst for his peace, the homesickness for his fellowship, which he has planted in the depths of our spirit, and it is his delight to still it and to make us blessed forever." By all appearances Schaff again means here that in the natural man, in the depth of his spirit, a "homesickness" for God, etc., is to be found — whereas in truth and in fact it is rather the case that in the depth of the fallen human heart there is, not homesickness for God, but enmity against God. For all men are carnal and sold under sin (Rom. 7:14). But to be carnally minded is enmity against God (Rom. 8:7).

In Schaff's sermon there are also philosophical explanations of the Holy Trinity, which do not belong in a sermon for the people, especially since they do not touch the matter itself at all but lead astray — as for instance the following: "The first two persons of the Godhead are called Father and Son, because the second is begotten of, known, and loved by the first; and the Holy Spirit is the bond of fellowship between the two. Where there is love, there is a trinity — a lover, a beloved, and a bond between the two.... In this uninterrupted self-communication and reciprocal movement between Father and Son in the Holy Spirit consisted the eternal activity, fullness of life, and blessedness of God." The Holy Spirit, however, when one speaks of the persons in the Godhead, is himself also a person, and not a mere "bond of fellowship." In the second place, it is simply not true that "where love is, there is a trinity"; where love is, there is rather only a duality. A bond of love among three — such as that of the Swiss on the Grütli — one might perhaps call a kind of trinity. And as for what is finally said of "self-communication and reciprocal movement," such matters ought rather to be things the philosophical scholars — if indeed they cannot leave off speculating about matters of which, though they lived a thousand years and their wisdom went on developing all the while, they would in the end not understand one hair's breadth more than a believing farmhand — debate among themselves, and leave out before the people. That only leaves the people's mouths agape in astonishment at the learned gentlemen's philosophical profundity, but gives them thereby neither nourishment for the mind nor refreshment for the heart.

What has greatly displeased us, and against which we, certainly in the spirit of every earnest Christian, must decidedly voice our protest and warning, is the self-willed alteration undertaken by Mr. Dr. Schaff