# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1859_S179
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Thoughts on Modern Theology. 179

respect. To be sure, it does belong to the task of theological scholarship
also to strive after an ever more perfect form of presentation, in order to
bring its subject matter to understanding ever more richly, more deeply,
and more precisely. But since content and form condition each other
mutually, and the weakening and alteration of the content also reacts,
deterioratingly, upon the form, its chief goal must remain to set forth the
divine truth according to its own essence and in all its aspects in such a
shape that the divine thought therein actually finds its adequate
expression. That is what the old dogmatics did. Its motto was: Tene rem,
et verba sequentur (hold fast to the matter, and the words will follow).
If, accordingly, the old dogmatics has not yet reached the ideal in formal
respects — which scholarship can in any case only ever attain relatively —
it nevertheless remains, in this, a model for our time: that it held fast with
unbreakable strictness to the content of revelation and embezzled nothing
of it, on account of which, to be sure, it still has to suffer disgrace enough
today as guardian of "pure doctrine."

Besides this, the old dogmaticians have yet another significant
advantage. They stood, out of innermost conviction, on the firm ground of
the ecclesiastical confession. They held fast to the analogy of faith with
holy conscientiousness. Thereby the most various gifts and the most
manifold powers gained a common basis for their scholarly activity. Each
successor entered into the work of his predecessor, made the results of the
latter's researches his own, and built further upon the scripturally
grounded foundation he found already laid. Thus there resulted, in fact,
an organic progress in the development of doctrine. Thus dogmatics
arrived at a unified, harmonious total work, at which the most enlightened
and most gifted minds of a richly blessed two-hundred-year church era
labored in common accord.

Wholly different is modern theology. It has already been remarked how
it denies, weakens, and intermixes with foreign elements the content of
revelation in manifold ways. To the degree that it does this, the form is
naturally affected as well. And indeed, the corruption of the content finds
an all-too-faithful reflection in the corrupt modern presentation, since it
gives, of the clouded ideas of revelation, only an unclear picture, and that
too in confused language.

To this is added, further, the subjectivistic arbitrariness and
disjointedness of the modern theologians. No one agrees with another;
each has his own particular system and moves within his own peculiar
circle of ideas, for which reason he also coins a wholly particular scholarly
language, which is properly, at best, intelligible to himself alone — if
indeed it is even that. Thus there reigns, in the domain of modern
theology, a truly Babylonian confusion of tongues. And since, for it, the
analogy of faith, the scriptural principle, and the confession, as well as the
older dogmatics, count as long-since-overcome standpoints, it is often very
difficult to penetrate into the sense of its