# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1864_S166
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

Synoptics — such as Matthew 2:1–12; 8:11; 28:19ff.; Mark 16:15, etc. — show
clearly the opposite.

So much, then, for the theory of the various doctrinal types of the New
Testament from the rationalistic standpoint, in its essential outlines — a
brilliant document of the poverty of spirit of this theological (or rather
pseudo-theological) tendency, whose character is so wretched that even its
bitterest enemies of the truth no longer dare to openly avow it; and yet
rationalistic "wisdom" is forever being served up anew, even if under other
names, and so, however weak the assertions just dealt with concerning the
various types of the New Testament may be, we are by no means certain that
they will not return; indeed, should that happen, we would have no cause at
all to be surprised by it, but would have to see in it a consequence very
well grounded in the whole direction of present-day theology.

If we now turn, however, to the believing theologians who contend against
this rationalistic view, we find among them knights who, on some points,
lower their lances even before their enemies, making them significant
concessions — although they seek to weaken and conceal these concessions
through vague, unclear talk of a "higher unity," of a relation "not of
opposition, but of reciprocal action and mutual complementation." According
to them, too, "differences are indeed to be acknowledged, both in the
content and in the form of the doctrine."

But whereas the rationalists made their distinctions from the standpoint of
different nations with different forms of culture, A. Neander struck out
on another path — one that nowadays is mostly followed, as the correct one,
in textbooks and lectures — according to which the various doctrinal types
are determined by the various apostolic personalities. Following
Galatians 2:9, each of the three pillars of the church is assigned a
particular doctrinal type, a particular basic outlook differing from the
others, a particular religious system; and so, by adding Paul to the three
pillars as a fourth, one arrives at the following four different doctrinal
types of the New Testament: "the doctrinal concept of James, the Petrine,
the Pauline, and the Johannine doctrinal concept" — different doctrinal
forms which form "a progression from below upward," inasmuch as James
conceives of Christianity as the "completed, fulfilled law," Peter as the
"fulfillment of the promise," while Paul and John detach it from the old
covenant — Paul asserting the opposition of Christianity to the Old
Testament but having first to "fight his way" to it, whereas John is in
"calm possession and contemplation of it" (Schmid, Biblical Theology of the
New Testament, 1859, p. 368ff.). To be sure, each of these four types is
now presented and developed as a particular system, yet a unity, something
common to them, is also established. But in what does this consist?
According to Schmid's textbook just named (probably the most widely
circulated from the "believing" standpoint), it consists in this: "that the
doctrine