# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1859_S187
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Literature. 187

conscious of waging a conflict of principles in the proper sense of the word."
We must here say, God have mercy on the Lutheran Church,
if it were in defending that Kurtz-ian interpretation of Gen. 6:1–4
that a defense of her principles were really at stake.

Two reviews of the work "The Marriages of the Sons of God" etc.
are found in the second quarterly number of the Rudelbach-Guericke
journal for this year. The first is by E. H. Engelhardt. There it says among other things: "The
present treatise is so comprehensive and thorough that, quite apart
from the polemic it contains (against Prof. Dr. Keil), it offers everything
that could possibly be required for the understanding of this difficult passage. We
claim for this work the merit of a definitive settling of this
question; so cogently, so thoroughly, so comprehensively is it here treated."

The second review is by Ströbel. We cannot refrain
from communicating it to our readers. Both it itself, and the comparison
of it with the contrasting Engelhardt, brings vividly before us once again,
in the most concrete way, how things stand in the field of German "believing,"
indeed "churchly," theology. Ströbel writes as follows:

"By this method anything possible and impossible can be found in
the Bible. Just watch closely how Kurtz goes about it.
First, in the 1st section ("on the history of the interpretation," etc.), he
lays before his readers the passage Gen. 6:1–4 according to the "weighty Codex Alexandrinus
and three younger codices" of the Septuagint; afterward he opens up for them
Philo, Josephus, the books of Enoch, the Zohar, the Jubilees, the Testament
of the Twelve Patriarchs, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Tatian, Irenaeus, Clement
of Alexandria, Methodius, Eusebius of Caesarea, Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius,
Ambrose, Sulpicius Severus, the records of the witch trials with their succubi
and incubi, the commentaries of the rationalist Enlightenment period, "the
good old Köppen, the orthodox Scheibel, the faith-swollen Stier,
the Reformed Dietlein, the Lutheran Drechsler, further Krabbe, von
Hofmann, Delitzsch, Baumgarten, Nägelsbach, Richers, Herder, Schneckenburger,
Jachmann, De Wette, Arnaud, Huther, Hahn," and so on, and so on.
Then he asks: How then is it written? How do you read it? It would have
to happen by signs and wonders if the answer did not turn out to be:
I read that the angels of God married the daughters of men and
begat the giants with them. Quite right, cries Kurtz, fix that firmly
in your mind! Now, in the 2nd section, devoted to "the interpretation," he
fetches the Hebrew text, recommends to the reader "lexicon, grammar,
and context" as the only permissible aids, and asks
after a while: Now, do you find confirmed what you noted down beforehand?
Answer: Yes! — This "Yes," together with the "dogmatic
and practical" applications flowing from it in the 3rd section, goes without
saying. Whoever has once become accustomed to those spectacles of tradition
sharpened to the point of seeing ghosts, that person's eyes are so thoroughly
ruined that he does not even see, let alone recognize, what is in the
Bible to be read. Had Luther searched the Scripture in this fashion,