# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1864_S167
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Modern Theory of the Various Doctrinal Types of the New Testament. 167

of all the apostles, so far as it is attested to us in the New Testament,
has as its common main subject the divine salvation and life in Jesus
Christ, and accordingly treats: 1. of the person of Jesus Christ, as Lord;
2. of the salvation and life which He has instituted, in opposition to the
corruption of sin in the world, namely: a. of the fulfillment of the old
covenant contained in this salvation and life; b. of participation in it
through faith in Jesus Christ, by means of a new birth from God; c. of the
fellowship of believers in love; and d. of the completion of salvation
through the completed revelation of Jesus Christ." — Note well! This is
the whole unity in the teaching of the various apostles: that their main
subject is the divine life in Christ and that they treat of the
above-named points! But what they teach about it — the actual content of
their teaching — is not one and the same; the unity consists only in this,
that they teach something (who knows what?) about those subjects. Those
words, cited as an example, cannot be understood otherwise; for nowhere in
the whole book is a common doctrinal concept of the New Testament set up.
The unity given there is the only one to be found; against this, each of
the four New Testament doctrinal types is developed in great detail in its
particularity, as a special system standing on its own without connection
to the others. O we poor Christians! We have, then, nothing certain in the
New Testament on which our faith could ground itself; we know only that it
treats of Christ and His redemption — which, indeed, the doctrinal systems
of the Arians, Socinians, Rationalists, Quakers, and all the unholy sects
also treat of — and which of the four apostolic systems one should now
follow and assent to, that every Christian may settle with himself! Our
believing theologians are often, no doubt, not clearly aware of these
dreadful consequences, and therefore do not wish to admit them either; but
they follow nonetheless with logical necessity. For if the teaching
contained in the writings of one apostle is presented as a particular
system, entirely separated from and essentially different from the
teaching of the other apostles, and the unity among them is sought only in
the subject matter they deal with, then all essential unity has simply
vanished; in point of doctrinal content we have only diversity, and they
are agreed only in their doctrinal object. It is clear from this that,
however much the invented contradictions of the rationalists have been
rejected and refuted from this side, the principle remains the same as
theirs, and in the main leads to the same results as well.

And in what relation, then, does this theory stand to faith in the divine
inspiration of Holy Scripture? It is not hard to discover this. For if
there are only different doctrinal systems of different men — however much
one may blunt the contradictions and veil the oppositions — then the New
Testament cannot be the work of the Holy Ghost, since He, as the Spirit of
truth, could only reveal one truth, one doctrine of salvation in Christ,
and could only im-