# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1859_S251
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Gleanings. 251

...still, between heaven and earth, a thousand things go on of which Madame Philosophy, that clever guardian of God, has not even an inkling, let alone knowledge or understanding. We also know, from the experience of our own age, even more thoroughly than the fathers did, that whoever applauds the hollow ranting of this fickle, declaiming "'free science'" can escape atheism only through an amiable inconsistency — as our author, respectable for his mild manner, does; for a god whose power reaches no further than human "'faculty of thought'" is, quite simply, no God at all, no infinite, incomprehensible Being of whom one could truly sing: "Thy power is wholly immeasurable!" — but rather a being circumscribed by finite, creaturely, anthropomorphic limits, something like a man conceived at the highest possible power, or something of that kind; and the rationalist article of faith in such a fetish, carpentered, led about, and schoolmastered by human reason, is only the ridiculous and faint-hearted species of a many-shaped atheism. In sum: it is reckless folly, for man as for angel, to wish to determine what his Creator may or may not do, may or may not say. Out of the compass of its own natural powers, a created spirit can never truthfully assert more than this much: "If I were God, I could do this, not do that; were I Christ, I would not say this or that, but would speak thus, were I Christ." That every further-reaching creaturely assertion runs out into sophistry and self-[illegible] and in the end becomes a laughingstock for children is an iron [illegible] of the order of creation, one that has quite recently again been carried out most brilliantly against the conceited "[illegible] philosophy," and one that no "'free science'" will ever conjure away."

IV. As already remarked under No. II, a so-called strictly linguistic interpretation of Holy Scripture is now making itself very much at home, and behaves as though it were only now bringing the true sense of Scripture to light. A chorus-leader of the representatives of this school is without doubt the much-praised exegete H. A. W. Meyer. Against his "conceited, fragmentary exposition of 1 Thessalonians 4:15f.," writes Ströbel, "Hölemann (in his little tract, The Position of St. Paul on the Question of the Time of Christ's Second Coming) carries through victoriously the thesis: Holy Scripture is to be explained grammatically, yet always at the same time canonically, that is, out of itself — and not the individual piece of Scripture alone out of itself, but always also together with, and according to, the larger whole of Scripture. In doing so, Hölemann at the same time applies the arithmetical counter-test to Meyer's exegesis: he shows, by its consistent extension, that it must miscalculate hermeneutically." Compare here what Luther writes, in the preface to his exposition of the last words of David, about the superiority of true knowledge of the faith over mere knowledge of language for right exegesis. (III, 2780ff.)

V. In a review, appearing in Rudelbach's journal (in this year's third number), of the following collection of sermons: "Sermons on the Sunday and Festival