# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1863_S151
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Dr. Tholuck on the Latest Current of Theology. 151

field, were not seized by an anxious, foreboding feeling, as before an
approaching catastrophe. To such a catastrophe the eternally ruling laws of
flourishing and declining, which hold their validity in nature as in
history, already point us. Thus the mighty current of rationalism, which
had reached its high point at the end of the last century, was broken
above all through the time of distress, which taught princes and peoples
to pray again, and had to yield to a believing scholarship. Yet believing
Christendom did not wish to dwell in the gourd-hut in the field; it sought
a house. In remembering that the blessing of the fathers builds houses for
the children, it recalled that its own house had been built by its
fathers; it turned back to the church of the Reformation, and Christian
life and Christian scholarship began to become churchly. A second period
of distress brought upon us the year of distress, 1848 — this too with a
decisive influence upon church and scholarship. — Meanwhile the
representatives of this direction have seen their work almost sink again.
Even the representatives of the foremost among the confessional faculties
declare that it is not a repristinated but a regenerated scholarship that
they strive for. Such a freer scholarship develops an eager activity down
to this very hour. But does it not seem to us that here too we see the
signs of an approaching catastrophe? Let us recall how we once had a time
when the representatives of all the other sciences reckoned it an honor
to fight for a common cause together with us theologians. Where is the
cheerful, vigorous younger generation, while the old master-builders
gradually die off? Where do philosophers now arise, as once Schelling,
Hegel — for him too we must reckon here (?) — who accounted it their
honor to be Christians; pious natural scientists, such as Steffens,
Schubert, Carl von Raumer; physicians such as Ennemoser? This whole
generation, which arose in the time of the Wars of Liberation, is gone —
and who has stepped into its place? The representatives of an
earth-born empiricism, of a materialism engendered out of the underworld.

While we in Prussia still feel secure, the churches in western Germany are
preparing to let rationalism, together with its ally, democracy, move
into their walls, and in a certain Saxon duchy the day stands at hand when
that example is to find its imitation. In a Swiss canton "the new
religion of the future" has cast aside all historical foundations, and
after Protestant France, after Holland, even onto the soil of England,
faithful to its belief, the radical wisdom of Germany — still confined
here within the narrow walls of the free congregations — has been
transplanted. Do we not hear there the feet of the gravediggers who stand
ready to carry our theology and church to the grave? —

It is not little faith to fear that a period of grace in the church has
run its course; it would be little faith only to doubt that the one who