# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1859_S177
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Thoughts on Modern Theology. 177

belongs to them as Christian doctrine. In short, one seldom meets a
writing in which a divine truth, in its sublimity above reason, in its
original fullness and revealed sharp definiteness, receives undivided
recognition. As a rule there shows itself an effort, for the sake of
subjectivistic cravings, to blunt, weaken, and break off the truth, whereby
such a thinning of the thought results that one soon becomes aware that
one has before one nothing but affected, hollow human wisdom.

Another fundamental flaw of modern theology is, in our opinion, that no
sharp boundary line is drawn between philosophy and theology, between
reason and revelation. Instead of confining itself to its own field and
taking up only doctrines conformable to Scripture, the newer dogmatics
appropriates from philosophy a good many propositions which do not
merely concern the form of presentation but have a content contrary to the
Word of God. Luther says: "One should not mix philosophy with
theology, but know how to separate the one from the other in the wisest
possible way." (Walch VIII, p. 2121.) Modern theology has not heeded
this faithful counsel, the consequences of which are becoming ever more
plainly evident. Through its displacement and intermixture with
philosophical elements it has, in fact, turned into a kind of Gnosticism,
which strives to develop higher truths and seeks to make, especially in the
field of Christology and of theology in the narrower sense, wholly new
disclosures and discoveries. One feels strange reading writings of this
sort. At the beginning one still meets Christian ideas well enough, but the
further one goes, the stranger and more unfamiliar the whole region
becomes to one; one is taken by surprise by "new, strange, wild fables";
the master promises to unveil for us the mysteries of the Christian faith,
and with great fluency the essence of the Holy Trinity is defined, etc. But
if one reflects on what one has read and asks after its biblical grounding,
one asks in vain. They are nothing but experiments of reason, mere
philosophumena, and the echoes of revelation show only how far the
speculation has removed itself from revelation's actual content. — Just so,
there are writings which speak of justification, of the Person of Christ, of
church and ministry entirely in the terminology of our Church; but if one
looks more closely, it is a wholly foreign, uncanny gnostic spirit that
misuses the sound words of our Church to denote things entirely
different. W. Flörke, in the Kirchliche Zeitschrift edited by Dr. Kliefoth and
Dr. Meyer, fifth year, p. 390, rightly rebukes this courting of philosophy
with reference to Revelation 2:20: "I have a few things against you, that
you allow the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, to teach and
seduce my servants, to commit fornication and eat things sacrificed to
idols," and says "that this manner of teaching, in the midst of Christendom,
teaches paganism — that it borrows, indeed, its shape, system, and method
from the ruling Church, but teaches the pagan thing which, born with
every child, the
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