# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1855_S295
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran Theological Pastor's Library. 295

...the sun can be spoken of, so with that question only of Johann Gerhard's Loci theologici. The full title of this great dogmatic work is: „Locorum theologicorum cum pro adstruenda veritate, tum pro destruenda quorumvis contradicentium falsitate per theses nervose, solide et copiose explicatorum Tomi novem." Johann Gerhard, born at Quedlinburg in Saxony on October 17, 1582, died at Jena on August 17, 1637, is without doubt the third among the greatest theologians of our church [as even Bossuet has remarked *)], beside whom, on the same rank, no fourth can then be placed. Learning and godliness are so united in him that one cannot say which of these two qualities was present in him to the greater degree. He was, in fact, a Theologus, a God-scholar in the true sense of the word, in whom theology dwelt not, as is usual, as a science, but as a Habitus supernaturalis. Oratio, meditatio, and tentatio — which according to Luther alone make a theologian — were the three schools in each of which Gerhard was trained from his youth, and in which he remained a zealous pupil to his very last breath. As for the tentatio, the trial of spiritual assault, first of all — God led our Gerhard deep into this school, most needful of all for a theologian, already in the fifteenth year of his age. Over the sixth Psalm he wrote the heading: "Spiritual trial from the wrath of God on account of sin," and, according to a surviving manuscript, added the marginal note: "I once experienced such a trial myself, but my God delivered me out of the deep abyss of that trial; ah, Lord, I am your eternal debtor!" In his diary he himself reports of this trial: "In the fifteenth year of my age I fell into grievous trial and serious illness — consumption, dropsy; for a whole year I spoke to no one beyond yes and no; I slept little, ate little, wept continually, prayed night and day without ceasing; after the year had run its course I was delivered by God's grace. Among my private papers one will still find a handwritten little prayer book, which I made at that time and thoroughly moistened with tears." See Vita J. Gerhardi, aut. E. R. Fischero, p. 13. While the boy Gerhard lay in this divine crucible, few, no doubt, would have known how to reconcile themselves to it, or have suspected that even then the Lord God, in the hot fire of profound spiritual trial, was fashioning for himself a chosen instrument — just as Luther too, in such a furnace of the most terrible and protracted anguish of soul and terror before God's wrath, was prepared by God to become what he afterward became. Johann Arndt, who at that time was pastor in Quedlinburg, was the instrument through which God not only spoke comfort to our Gerhard and at last raised him up again, but through which

*) He calls Johann Gerhard le troisieme homme de la Reforme apres Luther et Chemnice [the third man of the Reformation after Luther and Chemnitz] in his well-known Histoire de variations des eglises protestantes. Vol. 2, p. 455.