# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1859_S145
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From this year's Preface to the Saxon Church and School Paper. 145

objective law no person becomes righteous and blessed, but rather through personal faith, which is the freest, most inward, and most subjective thing there is, and which indeed takes up into the subjectivity of man all the great objectivities of the divine acts and words of salvation, and the small objectivities of human churchly and civil orders — not, to be sure, in order to arrange them there to suit itself, but in order to unite itself with them inwardly and thereby make them its own free possession. The word "freedom" is a double-edged sword, which can easily injure the one who takes it in hand, and which easily catches fire like a flame into a destructive blaze. But for all that a difference remains between the false, worldly freedom and the evangelical freedom of the Christian, who is bound, in the Holy Spirit, through and to the eternal divine truth. And since abusus non tollit usum, it will not be superfluous, in a time when there is so much talk of authority, objectivity, order, law, and so forth, and when such great diligence is rightly applied to establishing them, to recall that freedom of the "Spirit of the Lord" — and one may allow oneself such a reminder, even where it does not keep the measure of proper churchly truth and sobriety.

This brings me to Baumgarten and Beck. They have often been paired together in recent times, and rightly so, different as they also are. Both take up a position of opposition against the piety and churchliness of the positive party now prevailing; both have become questionable powers within their territorial churches; in the one case removal was demanded, in the other it was carried out. To be sure, Beck works only from the lectern and the pulpit, whereas Baumgarten has thrown himself into a journalistic writing career that takes up the most varied things without much selectivity or measure.

Beck's earnest testimony against the modern Christian character of noisy, often self-admiring busyness is necessary and salutary. From this breadth of outward churchly activity he calls back into inwardness and its birthplace of salvation. This is certainly the starting point of all Christian character and life on earth. But it would mean wrongly narrowing God's ways and work and his kingdom on earth if one wished to confine oneself to this alone. Beck makes Christianity one-sidedly inward and individual. He does not see that the Kingdom of God has a continuing existence on earth in the Church, and in it a history too. He is unhistorical, detached from the past and from the present as it has come to be historically, and from the historically formed general Christian consciousness of the present. And when he does connect with others, it is only the theologians of the Bengel school. As if the Holy Spirit had borne witness only in the handful of Württembergers Roos, Rieger, and so forth, and as if the individual need not concern himself at all with the whole, in whose fellowship alone he is and remains what he is. In this unhistorical