# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1864_S161
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume X.    June 1864.    No. 6.

(Submitted by Pastor Baumstark.)
The Modern Theory of the Various Doctrinal Types
of the New Testament.

Among the fundamental doctrines of our church which are, to present-day
theology, a stumbling block and a sign that is spoken against by it, one of
particular importance for theological life, both now and in the near
future, is its doctrine of inspiration. Of those theologians who nowadays
still hold fast to the old, unaltered concept of inspiration held by Luther
and the orthodox fathers of our church, there are in any case very few. For
apart from the openly unbelieving and rationalistic theologians, to whom
the Bible is not only an ordinary book but a particularly stupid one, whose
ridiculous errors it is an extraordinary pleasure and a welcome opportunity
for them to demonstrate, so as to prove their own acumen — apart from
these, numerous errors are also being charged to the Holy Ghost in most of
the commentaries of those theologians who fought against rationalism and
became the forerunners of today's "believing" school; and even from
professorial chairs occupied by "believing" theologians, the old concept of
inspiration is spoken of as a doctrine of whose untenability one has long
since become convinced, as of an outmoded standpoint; and it has been
found, precisely in the most recent times, in the case of several scholars
reckoned as heroes of the Lutheran Church and of orthodox theology, that in
the course of their scholarly investigations in the field of biblical
introduction and exegesis they arrived at results whose striking
coincidence with rationalistic ideas and assertions was no pleasant
surprise for the church. And how could it be otherwise? How can those
whose scholarly research is not absolutely governed and pervaded by simple,
childlike faith in Scripture as the Word of God, but instead grants human
knowledge a competent judicial seat alongside and above Scripture, and who
with it wish to serve not the church but human scholarship — how can they
arrive at other results? Whoever gives himself