# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1863_S59
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A New Homiletical Monthly. 59

clearly neither a rule nor a piece of counsel, but an attempted meditation to which, however, one cannot ascribe any surprising depth.

No. 19: "Do not let yourself be needlessly disturbed and distracted before going up into the pulpit, but shut yourself into your closet, so that your sermon, under prayer and the gathering of the mind, may receive the baptism of the Spirit and of fire from above." These, again, are grand, exaggerated turns of phrase. What good does that do a simple student or preacher? What is he supposed to make of it? The "baptism of the Spirit and of fire" was, after all, a special gift of the holy apostles. Is that also needed for preaching? And if someone is badly disturbed just before the sermon — as does sometimes happen, without the preacher being able to help it — what then? Is he then lacking the "baptism of the Spirit and of fire from above"?

No. 29: "In general the advice is: stop when the hearers' enthusiasm has risen to its highest point; then they will come all the more gladly next time." That is a true curiosity of a piece of counsel and a rule. "In general," I should think, the advice ought rather to be that the preacher stops when his sermon is finished. And in particular, that it is not even the goal of any sermon at all to bring the hearers' enthusiasm always to its very highest pitch. And finally, how is a preacher actually supposed to recognize "when the hearers' enthusiasm has risen to its highest point"? The Methodists can perhaps tell by the highest leaps — but by what can other Christians tell? —

After the "homiletical rules and counsels" there follows a "meditation," likewise from Dr. Schaff, on "the incarnation of God." Much that is stimulating, ingenious, and edifying is found in it. But here too an overwrought wish to appear ingenious has bothered us. Even a meditation must remain sober within the bounds of revelation and must not degenerate into untrue philosophical fancy, as for instance the following passage: "Open, O soul, thy hidden depths, and let the Son of God descend into thee, as once into the manger of Bethlehem, so that the holy mystery of the incarnation may repeat itself in thee as well, and the idea of religion — that is, the reunion of man with God — be realized ever more completely." The mystery of the incarnation has happened once and cannot and should not "repeat" itself in the soul of man. Christ Jesus does not intend to become man once again (the unio mystica that Schaff has in mind here is something entirely different!). To speak of the idea of religion "being realized ever more completely" is surely only an effect of the fixed idea belonging to the modern prophetism of the church of the future. The idea of religion — that is, of the reunion of men with God, which, in the time of the Old Covenant, if one wishes to put it that way, was indeed more merely an idea — has been fully and completely realized through the incarnation of God. Schaff here confuses the blessing, the effect of the fully realized idea of religion, with that idea itself.