# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1855_S131
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran-Theological Pastors’ Library. 131

The former alone will find in a good methodology much that will excellently assist them in the further study they need and preserve them from many detours and false paths. In our conviction, which we have reached through many comparisons, the best methodology for theologians is still the little book by Johann Gerhard, Methodus studii theologici, which first appeared in Jena in 1617 and was subsequently published often elsewhere as well. According to our new edition, prepared by the author’s son, Johann Ernst Gerhard, it comprises 324 duodecimo pages and is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the general requirements of theological study: 1. the proper ultimate purpose connected with study; 2. the zeal for true godliness that is necessary in pursuing it; and 3. the daily practice of devout prayer. The second part deals with the necessary preliminary studies: 1. knowledge of the languages; and 2. knowledge of philosophy. Finally, the third part provides guidance for successfully completing one’s theological course in five years. To be sure, this little work is not a complete methodology, and our church also possesses several other older and more recent methodologies containing excellent material; but if the question arises which one, among them all, should in any case be found in the library of a poor Lutheran pastor here, we name Gerhard’s, reserving all the others for the second and third classes.

As we now proceed to the individual disciplines, under

II. Category: Works for the Exegetical Disciplines,

we name

1. a work that covers all of them collectively, namely: “Salomonis Glassii philologia sacra.” This work, comprising more than a thousand large-quarto pages, first appeared in 1623. The best edition was prepared by Buddeus and accompanied by a preface, and it first appeared in 1713; afterward, however, the work was published several more times, most recently in 1797. Giving equal consideration to the Old and New Testaments, it is divided into six books. The first deals with the style of Holy Scripture: first, with the uncorrupted state of the biblical text (textual criticism); then with the excellences and distinctive character of the biblical style in general; and finally with the prophetic, New Testament, Johannine, and Pauline styles in particular. The second book deals with the sense of Scripture—the literal, mystical, typological, and allegorical—and how it is to be ascertained (hermeneutics). The third and fourth books deal with the grammar of the Old and New Testament languages. The fifth book contains biblical rhetoric and deals first with tropes—metonymy, irony, metaphor, anthropopathy, prosopopoeia, synecdoche, catachresis, hyperbole, allegory, proverb, and enigma—and then with those that are not, in the narrower sense