# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1864_S170
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

experience, and only he who is armed with this weapon is fully secure against such and similar seductions of this last age, which otherwise ensnare even the most unbiased man — since he is, after all, always caught and blinded in enmity against God and his Word. Indeed, Christians sense, from out of all the various writings of our canon, the one divine Spirit, even though in dissimilar instruments and gifts; they hear the one voice of their good Shepherd, even though through different human media; and in this diversity of the various human organs, under the influence of the various characters, temperaments and gifts, and of the various circumstances — yet with an entirely identical doctrinal content, inspired by the one Spirit of God — in that alone consists whatever truth hovers before the spokesmen of this whole theory, now under discussion, of the various doctrinal types of the New Testament. But it is quite perverse, indeed a proof of narrow-minded conceit bound up with great ignorance, or of malicious conceit, when one supposes that our old Lutheran theologians (say, for want of the requisite philological and historical knowledge, or of critical acumen) failed to observe those accidental differences, and that therein lay the ground of their strict, "stiff" concept of inspiration; whereas the newer theology, by virtue of its more advanced scholarship, has only now made the discovery of those differences, and has derived from it, as a necessary consequence, the theory of the various doctrinal types, and, in consequence thereof, also its lax concept of inspiration. No — the works of our old theologians give evidence, even as regards the theological auxiliary sciences, in the eyes of every impartial expert (we recall only Winer), that they, too, in this respect need not in the least take second place to today's generation of representatives of theological scholarship in general, but rather were, for the most thorough and solid labors of more recent times, the founding fathers even in these fields of theological research. They recognized very well the differences of style and the like among the various sacred writers, but did not, as genuine "thinking readers of the Bible," therefore feel compelled to perform logical salto mortale's, and so did not arrive at such results as the modern luminaries of the church (with their inference from differences of style to different doctrinal types); rather, they explained the matter, as men accustomed to taking deliberate and sure steps in their thinking, simply as we read it, for example, in Quenstedt (Theologia didactico-polemica I. 76): "There exists among the sacred writers, as regards style and manner of speech, a great diversity, which seems to arise from this, that the Holy Spirit accommodated himself to each one's ordinary manner of speech and left to each his own particular mode of expression; yet on that account it need not be denied that the Holy Spirit himself inspired in each his own peculiar words,"*) or in Calov

*) Magna est inter sacros scriptores quoad stilum et genus dicendi diversitas, [There is great diversity among the sacred writers as to style and manner of speech,]