# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1861_S5
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Theological Axioms.   5

which do contain the most irrefutable truths, and are clothed in the form of a paradox for that very reason — in order thereby to stir reflection all the more, to delight even while instructing, to come to the aid of memory through the distinctiveness of the expression, and to impress the truth all the more deeply and lastingly upon the mind. Following the principle "All things are yours!" even profane adagia are at times put to use by the theologian as theological axioms, in that he reinterprets them and gives them a higher meaning. Martin Chemnitz writes of this in his Loci theologici: "It is customary, for the support of memory and for the sake of explanation, to condense the sum of doctrine into brief propositions and rules; as: God is not the author of sin; the Gospel does not abolish the ordinances of civil government. And those rules (whether one chooses to call them axioms or theorems, the ancients called them canons) must be carefully observed in every individual locus [article of doctrine]. For they govern the judgment concerning the doctrine of the whole locus." *)

So likewise Johann Gerhard writes of this in his Loci theologici: "If certain passages of Scripture, taken by themselves and apart from others, are obscure, they are so either on account of the matter or on account of the words. For removing the obscurity that has its ground in the matter, it is useful — besides the illumination of the Holy Spirit, which must be obtained through earnest prayer — to hold fixed in mind, in every article of Christian doctrine, certain sure axioms, which are to serve as it were as the pole-star and the norm by which the treatment of the rest must be guided. Such axioms may be called Catechetica or Elementaria; commonly they are called theological rules. By a faithful and diligent interpreter of Scripture they can be gathered according to the order of the theological loci [articles of doctrine]." **)

Since we had, for our own private use, made a collection of such axioms in the course of our theological reading, and had communicated it, together with the manifold benefit drawn from it, to a brother, the latter moved at the last-held general

*) [Latin, kept as printed] Usitatum est, juvandae memoriae et declarationis causa summam doctrinae brevibus propositionibus et regulis complecti; ut: Deus non est auctor peccati; evangelium non abolet politias. Et illae regulae (sive axiomata, sive theoremata appellare quis voluerit, vetustas vocavit canones) diligenter in singulis locis sunt observandae. Gubernant enim judicium de doctrina totius loci. Loc. th. fol. 15. b.

**) [Latin, kept as printed] Si quae scripturae loca per se et seorsum sumta obscura sunt, talia sunt vel propter res, vel propter verba. Ad amoliendam ex rebus natam obscuritatem praeter Spiritus S. illuminationem seriis precibus impetrandam utile est tenere certa quaedam in quovis doctrinae christianae articulo axiomata, quae sunt veluti cynosura et norma, ad quam reliquorum pertractatio exigenda. Axiomata talia possumus dicere Catechetica vel Elementaria, vulgo dicuntur regulae theologicae. Colligi vero possunt ab industrio et fideli scripturae interprete juxta seriem locorum theologicorum. Loc. th. de interpr. S. S. § 190.