Note 27 — Chapter I
Neil Buchanan translation
Footnote 27:
(return)
Rössler, Lehrbegriff der Christlichen Kirche in den 3 ersten Jahrh. 1775; also, Arbeiten by Burscher, Heinrich, Stäudlin, etc., see especially, Löffler's "Abhandlung welche eine kurze Darstellung der Entstehungsart der Dreieinigkeit enthält," 1792, in the translation of Souverain's Le Platonisme devoilé, 1700. The question as to the Platonism of the Fathers, this fundamental question of the history of dogma, was raised even by Luther and Flacius, and was very vigorously debated at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries, after the Socinians had already affirmed it strongly. The question once more emerges on German soil in the church history of G. Arnold, but cannot be said to have received the attention it deserves in the 150 years that have followed (see the literature of the controversy in Tzschirner, Fall des Heidenthums, p. 580 f.). Yet the problem was first thrust aside by the speculative view of the history of Christianity.