# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1861_S4
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

4   Theological Axioms.

the word, the specific benefit of grace of every sacrament likewise falls into shadow, just as before faith its specific saving effect does." p. 327f. (It is clear that in this critique of the Lutheran doctrine of the purpose and power of the holy Lord's Supper a fundamental difference between the Kahnis-ian and the Lutheran doctrine comes to light. To go into Kahnis's views would be nothing less than to give up the entire doctrine of justification of our church. This is not the place to demonstrate that; we reserve it, however, for another occasion.) —

That both members of the editorial committee regard themselves as jointly and severally responsible for the doctrine represented in this Lutheran journal would hardly need special mention, were it not that it has become the formal fashion of our time to turn even journals wishing to be Lutheran into organs through which anyone who formally professes the symbols of the church as his own may carry his "views," even where they deviate from the doctrine of the church, to market — which seems to us a worse union than even a liturgical or ecclesiastical-governmental one.

C. F. W. Walther.
C. H. R. Lange.

Theological Axioms.

There is a certain number of recurring statements in the writings of the theologians which, containing a whole sum of important truths in brief, pithy words, bear the name of theological axioms. To know these, and, so to speak, to keep them ever before one's eyes, is of the highest importance for the theologian. They embody the analogy of faith; they form for theological study both an excellent basis and a sure regulative; they also serve the less instructed as a good touchstone of pure and false doctrine; they are a guide through the thicket of the various circulating errors; they shed a bright light over whole regions of theology; indeed, taken together they might well be called a theologia in nuce [theology in a nutshell]. They are often the results of more than a century of theological labor; they are the adequate expression found for what has hovered before thousands as truth; they are pithy statements which have withstood the sternest trial by fire, and beneath which the great cloud of orthodox divines of the past have set the seal of their unreserved assent. Originally uttered by a single theologian alone, the statement immediately fell like a kindling flash of lightning into all the hearts that read it, and everyone said to it his Yes and Amen. It is true that one commonly reckons among the theological axioms also certain paradoxes which, at first glance, appear to be nothing less than settled truths, but rather the boldest hypotheses, indeed even self-contradictory statements. Yet there really are such paradoxes,