# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1850 10 15_S25
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Der Lutheraner.
"God's Word and Luther's doctrine pure shall now and evermore endure." (Rev. John, Chap. 14, v. 6 7.)
Published by the German Ev. Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and other States.
Edited by C. F. W. Walther.
Volume 7.  St. Louis, Mo., the 15th of October, 1850.  No. 4.
Terms: Der Lutheraner appears once every two weeks, at the yearly subscription price of One Dollar for subscribers at a distance, who are to pay the same in advance and to bear the postage. — In St. Louis each single number is sold for 5 Cents.
Only those letters which contain communications for the paper are to be addressed to the editor; all others, however, which contain business matters, orders, cancellations, moneys, etc., are to be sent hither under the address Mr. F. W. Barthel, care of C. F. W. Walther, St. Louis, Mo.

(Sent in by P. Keyl.)

The Old Approved Measures of the Lutheran Church for the Abundant Exercise in the Word of God.

(Continuation.)

Of the opposing party in the church, however, which is commonly called the orthodox, Dr. Kliefoth says: "The right handling of the church's system of instruction had slipped away from it, but its order it did not touch. In spite of its awkwardness it had held fast the doctrine and had not neglected the handing down of the doctrine. If one must therefore concede to the orthodox in this respect a preference over the Pietists, yet one must also not overlook that between the orthodoxy of Luther's time and that of Spener's time there was a difference such as there is between vigorous manhood and feeble old age.

We would now see further in what relation Rationalism stood to Pietism and what ruinous influence it exerted on preaching and catechetical exercise.

Rationalism — if one will allow the expression for that whole sum of phenomena in which that break with historical Christianity and churchliness was carried out — carried further the beginnings made by the Spenerian tendency. As much weight as the Spenerian tendency had laid upon Christian feeling, so much did Rationalism lay upon human thinking, opining, and fancying. Whereas the former had pushed history aside, the latter went a step further and declared itself without shame against historical Christianity, and although both tendencies are in their nature widely different from one another, yet they meet in their opposition to the old wholesome form and norm of the Lutheran Church, as this is already evident from the combating of private confession, from the abbreviations of the divine service, and many similar things, which found their beginning in the Pietistic, their completion in the Rationalistic tendency; but we shall also find in the subject before us occasion enough to perceive the confirmation of those assertions. If, for example, Spener had taken it upon himself, after his own good pleasure, to divide the Holy Scripture into four "quarters," and, with the exception of one quarter, to designate the other three as impractical; if, according to his views, he had found it more edifying to preach rather epistles than gospels, rather doctrine than history, rather the New than the Old Testament, rather in a self-chosen Christian fashion than in a definitely churchly one, was it not quite natural, when still more kinds of wind of doctrine began to blow, now to cast the last quarter of Holy Scripture after the first three, the epistles after the gospels, the New after the Old Testament, doctrine after the histories, Christianity after churchliness?

How for a tendency so different in its whole way of thinking, nothing but the most thoroughgoing transformation could be in store for the old churchly system of instruction and its orders, is masterfully described in Kliefoth's essay in the following words: "The old system of instruction was ordered on the presupposition that it had its content in the Word of God presented by Holy Scripture; thus its aim was understanding of Scripture and life in Scripture, and its way was the imparting of Scripture; the Scripture it had read aloud, the Scripture it had explained in preaching, the Scripture it had wished to have gathered up into a sum in the Catechism and laid out into a connected body of doctrine in the catechism sermon. If the fountain of religion was not in history but in reason, could one not have it much nearer and more conveniently? and was not that way prescribed by the Church a long and tedious way? Further, the old Church, in its view of the historical basis of all Christian faith and life, had given historically firm foundations to the whole oral proclamation and the whole learning of the congregation, in that it had laid beneath that whole activity definite texts, the sections of the Bible, the parts of the Catechism, the ten commandments, the confession of the Church, etc. But what these foundations offered, were they not precisely those doctrines neither to be found nor needful in the general and eternal religion of reason, whose