# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1855_S206
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

206 Lutheran-Theological Pastors’ Library.

to make use of and benefit from this brilliant and highly learned theologian, and to communicate several judgments of our orthodox theologians concerning Flacius, all the more so since we shall repeatedly have occasion in our “Pastors’ Library” to refer to works by this author. Johannes Musäus, who reissued Flacius’s Clavis Scripturae Sacrae in a corrected edition, writes, among other things, in the preface to this work: “The author, however, fell into the error concerning original sin not through rashness and frivolity, not through pride, nor because he was driven by a desire to innovate with respect to the doctrine accepted in the church, but in the course of a bitter and difficult controversy over the free will of unregenerate man and his powers in conversion. Just as this controversy had occupied the most learned Church Fathers many centuries earlier and had caused great unrest in the church, so at that time it took place between Flacius, a man of passionate temperament and burning zeal for the preservation of pure religion, and Victorin Strigel, the leading figure among the Synergists or Semipelagians of that age. He entered into a public duel with the latter—would to God that he had done so with as much experience in the arts and philosophy as in Scripture and theology! His opponent was both a philosopher distinguished by the standards of that age and a sophist thoroughly experienced in all the cunning and intrigues commonly employed in an evil cause; the less well armed he was with solid proofs from Scripture, the more alert he was to every opportunity to deceive.” B. Meisner likewise writes: “His writings do not permit us to say that Flacius erred in the foundation of the faith and maliciously disturbed the church, nor does Christian love advise us to do so.” (Tract. de eccles. p. 134.) C. Val. Löscher likewise judges: “In my opinion, it is clear from that colloquy that Flacius meant better than his words sounded; therefore, whenever something harsh again escapes him, he also endeavors in every way to soften it. And I believe that he did not fully hold the opinion which some after him defended under his authority and which is generally imputed to him as well. From this declaration of his, which was made less than a year before his death and which, in part, where he erred, may well be regarded as a retraction, one sees that, with good intentions, his only concern was that the depth of the corruption and the abominable harmfulness of original sin should be properly considered. In this matter he certainly could have chosen his words somewhat more cautiously, but he also had to endure far too much. His very last work, Origo controversiae de peccato originis, also provides various grounds for this view. By this we do not criticize what our Formula Concordiae and our worthy teachers wrote against the opinion quod peccatum originale sit substantia; rather, I believe only that they chiefly refuted Spangenbergum, Irenäum, Wigandum, Cölestinum, Reßium, Scheflerum, and others, who wrongly appeal to Flacium. Colerus himself, who him