# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1850 10 01_S18
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

18

in that valuable essay not touched upon at all, although the Spenerian tendency proceeded precisely from this direction; the latter, however, has been portrayed so aptly and candidly that one must wish to receive very soon a similar description of the Arndian, and especially also of our own most recent time. How the times do change with respect to judgment concerning the age! Whoever ten years ago had expressed himself thus about the Spenerian tendency would without doubt have been declared by pietistically minded Lutherans to be an anti-pietist caught in blind zeal, and therefore also an anti-Lutheran. May God grant that in the two other respects also the time may soon come when men will at last speak out freely.

The Spenerian tendency was very much inclined to pass off all instruction in preaching and catechesis that had not proceeded from itself as a dead knowledge, which must first come to life through the heart's own feeling. "To bring the head into the heart" is Spener's customary saying, and is in all the activity of himself and his pupils the final aim. Therefore all the ancient church arrangements with respect to preaching and the Catechism were judged only by the one-sided principle of edification and awakening. Much of it was, as an external, useless appendage, either altered at one's own discretion or set wholly aside, and so the Spenerian tendency became the beginner of all those arbitrary alterations in church regulations which many a Lutheran preacher still permits himself. Through Spener and his pupils certain fixed forms came into use, so that almost everything was cut to one last.

The regular Bible lessons without exposition, which the Lutheran Church had so judiciously ordained, Spener declared outright to be, if not harmful, yet a waste of time. The sermons on the Gospels suffered many injurious changes. The historical element of the church year disappeared more and more from the sermon, and it was turned into a dry doctrinal treatise. The wretched practice of the yearly series gained the upper hand, in that one no longer arranged the content of the sermon according to the Gospel at hand, but forced the Gospel into a certain general theme which ran through all the sermons of the whole church year, whereby naturally the presentation of doctrine, and especially the right dividing of the Law and Gospel, had to suffer great harm. In such a manner Spener himself published three different yearly series on the Gospels with the titles: Glaubensgrund, Glaubenstrost and Lebenspflichten.

Against the Gospels themselves Spener made all those objections which have been repeated ever anew down to our own time: that they are a remnant from Popery, that they do not lead to much that belongs to Christian faith and life, that besides them there are so many other and rich passages of Scripture, which would now be withdrawn from the congregations, etc. Thus Spener says among other things: "Since it cannot be denied that, when one wishes to set forth the chief matters which we have to carry on in Christendom, the evangelical texts give us very little occasion, but almost everything must be inserted only incidentally, yes, often dragged in by the hair, which would not be so with the Epistles." Hence he thinks "that much richer edification is to be found in the Sunday Epistles than in the Gospels."

How arbitrarily and how highly unchurchly Spener proceeded in such matters can also be seen from this, that the custom, which arose only after Luther's time, of prefacing the sermon with a special introduction, he abused to make of this introduction a special sermon, in which he expounded individual books of the Holy Scripture or the Catechism; then he read the Gospel of the day and preached also "somewhat briefly" upon it.

That with this tendency not much was to be expected for the proper exposition of the biblical books, and especially of the historical ones, one sees to excess from Spener's judgment: "I trust that what is found in the whole half of Scripture, or perhaps three quarters of it, from which a simple man, of whose kind the very most members of the Church always are, can properly be edified in faith and life, could be compressed into not many sheets, at the least that in the remaining half or quarter of Scripture it would be so replaced that such a one could dispense with the rest without loss." From this it is to be explained that Spener expounded no book of the Old Testament, and of the New Testament only some few apostolic epistles; on the other hand he preached sermons on Arnd's True Christianity, and thereby entered upon an entirely new, unchurchly way, on which many have followed him down to the most recent time, in that they preached on texts other than biblical or catechism texts.

With respect to the exercise of the Catechism, Spener held that reciting and saying over of it, upon which the old Lutheran Church set so much store, yes, even the learning of the Catechism by heart, which formerly was to be excused to no one, to be just as unnecessary and time-consuming as the Bible lessons; the Spenerian school soon held the whole plan and content of the Catechism no longer sufficient, and later set beside it a form hitherto wholly unusual, namely the so-called orders of salvation. The Large Catechism of Dr. Luther also was held to be no longer sufficient and was displaced by all sorts of other expositions.

Above all, however, Spener here also developed a fault, for which the ground had indeed been laid already before, and which we have not overcome to this very day. This was the Spruchwesen, that custom which proceeded from an entirely unhistorical view of Scripture and from a one-sided conception of Christianity as doctrine, and according to which one picked out for the several subjects of the catechism doctrine a number of passages of teaching, exhortation, and comfort, and sought to impress these upon the memory of young and old as the sum of Holy Scripture; thereby, apart from other evils, no small torment was caused to the teachers by the choice of the passages, often offered by the heap, as well as by their right explanation, and to the learners by the retaining of these passages, often learned only mechanically, and in such a manner the whole catechism instruction was more and more made loathsome to both.

The catechism sermons differed in nothing from the sermons on the Gospels and the sermons expounding Scripture, which, erroneously, were treated no otherwise than as catechism sermons, that is, as mere, and indeed rather dry, doctrinal sermons. The catechism examinations were, the longer the more frequently, torn loose from the catechism sermons, quite contrary to the old churchly practice, and consisted for the most part in the tracing back of the words of the Catechism to individual passages of the Bible. If these examinations were held in a similar manner to that of which one finds a sample in Spener's Bedenken on the doctrine of Baptism, then it is indeed hard to comprehend how they, for example in Dresden, should have found so much approval and participation; probably Spener's official position as Chief Court Preacher and the charm of novelty contributed much to it. Moreover, the often repeated assertion that Spener first reintroduced the catechism examinations stands in manifest contradiction to all the old church orders.

Very aptly says Dr. Kliefoth at the close of his description of the pietistic period: "After Spener had thus misjudged and perverted the whole order of the Church in these and many other particulars, he and his followers then began their complaints that in the Church there were no proper places in which to do the right thing; they set up collegia pietatis in the houses, after they had by false treatment made useless the means of the weekday services ordained by the Church for the needs of the more advanced members of the congregation; and they raised that cry for 'new means,' which down to this very day continues to resound in the same unconcern about the old means."

This is also confirmed by our experience here in this country; for did not those venerable men who a hundred years ago transplanted the Lutheran Church hither belong to the Halle or pietistic school, and are not originally all those who are now so much taken with the "new measures" come forth from their school?

In that essay it says further: "A tendency which, with such a misjudging of history on principle, wished to base the life of faith of the Church upon the fruits of faith, and to make firm through the heart the faith which is first to give firmness to the heart, must