# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1864_S163
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Modern Theory of the Various Doctrinal Types of the New Testament. 163

theory of the various doctrinal types of the New Testament, which nowadays
is common currency everywhere, and by which, accordingly, as the expression
indicates, is to be understood not a diversity of style and the like
grounded in the diversity of individuals and circumstances — for this we by
no means deny — but a diversity of doctrine among the sacred writers. —

The origin of this theory falls, naturally enough, in the age of encroaching
unbelief; it was cherished and nurtured as a pet child by the rationalism of
the past and of this century, and present-day theology has not been able
entirely to rid itself of it, because it has not entirely rid itself of
rationalism generally. As soon as one threw overboard the faith in the
immediate, absolute divine inspiration of Holy Scripture as an outmoded
standpoint, and regarded the Bible as a human book, one could also see, in
the historical accounts and doctrines of the evangelists and apostles,
nothing other than the independent productions of various human
individuals, whose divergence from one another was therefore already to be
presupposed as probable; the apparent difficulties and contradictions among
the various authors were so easy to explain; nothing, indeed, is more
natural than that different reporters should report differently on one and
the same matter, and hold divergent views about it. When the human
understanding, robbed of the illumination and guidance of the Holy Ghost,
considered the various modes of expression; when one saw that one author
emphasized this side of the doctrine of salvation, and another emphasized
another side preferentially, then, given such a superficial view of Holy
Scripture, nothing was more natural than to see, in the diversity of
expressions and the emphasis on this or that point, a diversity of
conceptions, different points of view from which the essential fact of
salvation had been considered — especially since there was added to this
the evil will, already established by natural corruption and heightened by
the renunciation of faith that had already taken place. For it is surely
certainly not to be assumed that the merely misguided, yet otherwise
sincere, truth-seeking scholarly research of rationalism arrived at such
results; rather, in the pursuing and following of this direction there
shows itself throughout a dogmatic interest. Rationalism's concern was to
shake the authority of the biblical doctrine it hated. It therefore had to
show that the highest authority of the faith itself already contained
various types, various doctrinal forms diverging from one another in the
matter itself. The purely grammatical-historical interpretation helped all
the more easily to discover these differences, inasmuch as one did not want
to see unity, but from the outset proceeded with the presupposition and the
intention of finding differences, and indeed as great as possible. Thus
differences were found not only in the doctrinal concept of the New
Testament writers, but people also thought they perceived sharp oppositions
between the teaching of Christ and that of the apostles — oppositions which
could only be denied from a biased standpoint