Scripture Principle 2: German attacks on inerrancy; von Hofmann, etc.

[2019-02-18: fixed missing underlining]
      This continues from Part 1 (Table of Contents in Part 1) in a series presenting an English translation of Walther's major essay on  the Inspiration of Holy Scripture in the Missouri Synod's chief theological journal, Lehre und Wehre. —  Walther is serious now as he leads the charge for all of Christendom against the juggernaut of unbelief, whether it be of sola gratia or sola scriptura.  To all the theologians, past and present, who have praise for these German theologians and also the German theology of the 20th century (which covers most of today's theologians) – Walther is your main opponent.  But if you, dear reader, would be a Christian,... Walther is your best friend.

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Translation by BackToLuther; all highlighting, text in square brackets and red font are my additions; underlining follows Walther's emphasis.

Lehre und Wehre, vol. 32, January, p. 3-6: "Foreword" by C.F.W. Walther

(page 3)

We do not place this message at the top of this year's foreword of our theological monthly journal only because it was, at last through the recent Dorpat events, that the modern-believing and modern-Lutheran theologians had “fallen away from the Bible”. Unfortunately, this is already well known not only to all theologians, but also to those lay people who in recent times are concerned about the affliction of Joseph [Amos 6:6] as living members of the Church.  

Already in the first issue of this journal [LuW v. 1, no. 8 (August 1855), pp. 248-250], already thirty-one years ago, we had to seriously reproach Professor Dr. Kahnis. At that time he was far better off than at present, when he had not yet made public his fall from all foundations of the whole Christian religion, which was not done until 1861 in his Lutheran Dogmatics. In his writing from 1854,

“The Inner Path of German Protestantism”, Dr. Kahnis declared [LuW v. 1, p. 248; German]: “Protestantism stands and falls with the principle of the sole authority of Scripture. But this principle is independent of the doctrine of inspiration of the old dogmaticians.  To resume it as it was, can be done only by hardening against the truth” (!)  Accordingly further, Lehre und Wehre, Vol. XVII (1871) ,  p. 72 ff.,  Jahrg. XXI (1875), pp. 258 ff., by literal excerpts from the writings of the modern-believing and modern-confessional theologians, as von Hofmann, Kahnis, Luthardt, Kurtz, Dieckhoff, Grau, even Thomasius, and Delitzsch, it was noted that these have collectively abandoned the divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures.  Lehre und Wehre recorded the explicit public confession of  the Erlanger Zeitschrift of 1873, p. 222 [German text]:

that “no one represents the old-church doctrine of Inspiration, in Germany at least,”. Finally, Lehre und Wehre XXIV (1878), p. 316, and XXVII (1881), p. 218, also gave examples of how blasphemous and trifling are the little spirits, the faithful disciples of those academic teachers, who are not ashamed to speak such now of Holy Scripture. In the “Saxon Church and School Sheet” [Sächsisches Kirchen- und Schulblatt; German text]

(page 4)

in August 15, 1878 [p. 277], such a Pythagorean wrote: “Luthardt says somewhere: The formula to judge what the position of Scripture is, we have not yet found. (!) To this confession, the revered teachers of our Evangelical Lutheran Church could only be induced by the consideration that there was nothing to do with the mechanical inspiration of words and letters, because the existing imperfections, inaccuracies, contradictions, and therefore error, can not be denied. . . . We have indeed the whole of the Scripture” (i.e. the Scriptures as a whole synecdochally) “as the Word of God which offers us the truth of salvation necessary for salvation, but not every single word and sentence.”  — In Luthardt's Theologisches Literaturblatt of 4 March 1881 [p. 67] also writes a reviewer, no doubt a theologue minorum gentium. “It's pure misunderstanding; as if the author of the time wanted to repristinate the Bible to be seen as a book coming straight from heaven, and so unilaterally conceived of the truth of its divine origin that they forgot that the prophets and apostles carried the treasure of divine wisdom in earthly vessels.” (It's as if gold in earthen vessels would become dirty slag!) “If one then lets not even the choice of expressions remain for the authors [of the Bible], so L.K.P. [sic K.L.P] sees in the numbers as ‘unconditional truth’. He should not forget that it is for the ‘defense and the protection of the Bible’, as the infallible Word of God, to preserve neither a cultural-historical standpoint nor their scientifically correct chronological statements, but that we preserve in them the deposit of God's great revelatory facts [Offenbarungstatsachen] to the world, also the religious truths, and that you believe in these facts, but will not believe in their style of such and such version.”  —

“immortalized” von Hofmann:
“divine-human” Scriptures,
“whole of Scripture”

Undoubtedly it is the immortalized Prof. von Hofmann, from whose school most modern-Lutheran academic theologians have arisen or to whom they all have much to thank for their theology, by whom the doctrine of the so-called “divine-human” character of the Holy Scriptures has come to almost universal acceptance. The whole nature of his theological system requires a Bible of such a character, and while he downright rejected it, takes his exposition by the construction of a theological system of the Scriptures, and only wants them to be judged from the whole of Scripture, [Schriftganzen, cp. with Brief Statement § 2]  he understands, however, to speak so to the church, that in his dissolution of all the primary fundamental articles of our most holy Christian faith he appeared to many as the most orthodox of the Orthodox, and as the true inventor of true theological science.

True it is when Dr. Th. Kliefoth in his criticism of von Hofmann’s so-called “Scripture Evidence” on (page 5) the doctrine of the Holy Scriptures writes, among other things, as follows: “The second consequence, which results from the non-distinction of the time of the revelation and the time of the church, concerns the things which bring forth the history of revelation, also the truth of salvation, the revealed Word of salvation, the Holy Scripture. God makes the righteous people in fellowship with the history of revelation, so of course, these results are also a joint product of God and this man, not given by God to man and merely accepted by men, but produced by God with these people in the form of historical development. This is the new doctrine of the ‘divine-human’ nature of revelation and the Scripture,  which now with a full mouth is proclaimed as the real starting point of a new church period. [A New Age?]  With utmost refinement one looks back to the theory of revelation and inspiration in the dogmatics of the seventeenth century, as to an education which could not hold up against advanced science; but, in truth, it deals only with a few excesses of  this theory. 1)  

One does not fail to notice that the new doctrine of the divine-human nature [Gottmenschlichkeit] of revelation and of the Holy Scriptures, allegedly brought into the field of that theory, does not merely expose that theory but also breaks what the Church has always held and what that theory only wanted to defend, the faith in the inspiration of Scripture itself, the Holy Scriptures in line with what everyone holds now as the book written under the confirmation of  the Holy Spirit. This new doctrine leaves the Holy Scriptures as having no other preference than that of an early historical date, than as a source authority for the time, and thus treats of Scripture as no longer differing significantly from rationalism.” (See Kirchliche Zeitschrift, edited by Dr. Th. Kliefoth and Dr. O. Mejer., vol. 6, Schwerin. 1859 p. 636 f.) [Dr. O. Mejer (1818-1893)] — The special significance of this does not come from the appearance of those Dorpat professors, that they denied the divine inspiration of the Holy Scripture, and declared them to be a book in which to distinguish the error of infallibility, and held the unessential from what belongs to the history of salvation; for that is the position which all today’s modern-believing theologians give to Scripture. Rather, only this gives its sad special meaning, that this doctrine of the laity of the world has been presented by men who have hitherto been regarded by the lay as believing,

———————

1) Could Dr. Kliefoth, for example, mean that the dogmatists have taught an inspiration of even the Hebrew vowel signs, indeed, some of them even the accents? — Luther does not teach either.

(page 6)

even orthodox and confessional theologians, indeed, men who, in this time of unbelief, still stand before the breach and make themselves as a wall against the infiltration of unbelief into the church. So the question of inspiration, which was already a burning one, has become the most burning question of our time.

= = = = = = = = =   continued in Part 3   = = = = = = = = = =

The German theologian J. H. Kurtz called Walther's Missourians "everywhere quite unimportant".  We see now why this was so, for Germany knew that Walther (in America) was their chief opponent! Some call these German theologians (Walther's opponents) "Neo-Lutherans" (see #s 11-15 here).  Walther had his own terms for them and their theology:

“Pythagoreanism” 

“little spirits”

And Walther places J.H.C. von Hofmann at the head of Germany's theologians attacking the Bible.  He will be examined further in upcoming segments of this series.  We will also review the praise of von Hofmann among today's theologians, particularly Valparaiso University Prof. Matthew Becker. — In the next Part 3, Walther lets loose...