# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1864_S176
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

176 Martin Chemnitz on Usury.

view, Ambrose says: "Against him with whom one rightly wages war, usury may lawfully be practiced; demand usury of him whom it would be no crime to kill; he fights without iron who demands usury; he avenges himself upon the enemy without a sword who collects usury from the enemy." (14 Quaest. 4.) Yet the other explanation, found in Gerson, is simpler. It rests, namely, on this distinction: God was, in the Old Testament, both a theologian and a lawgiver. For in one place he teaches how God is to be served in righteousness and holiness before him. But in another place he prescribes for that people certain political ordinances for the external society of civil life in the Israelite state; that is, as we commonly say, he exercises now the law of the earth, now the law of heaven (jus fori et jus poli), and establishes both civil jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of conscience. But in the civil laws which God gave to the people of Israel, the righteousness and holiness of conscience are not always prescribed; rather, they are calculated for the preservation of the external and civil society within that civil commonwealth, according to the disposition and customs of that people, to whom God himself ascribes a stiff neck. Because God therefore prescribed to the civil authority laws concerning judicial order — which vices were to be punished, and with what civil penalties — he saw that it was impossible for the untamed wickedness of men to be wholly restrained by political laws through civil penalties. So that, in the civil society of that people, worse things might be avoided, he did not indeed approve of a good deal of lesser evil, but permitted that, out of political considerations, it should be tolerated to this extent: that it was not punished by the civil authority. Thus, according to Exodus 21:21, whoever has struck his servant so that he dies of it is not punished civilly as a murderer; but he was not thereby excused in his conscience before God. So too the bill of divorce and usury toward foreigners were permitted before the political court of the Israelite state to this extent, that they were not punished by the civil authority. But because the Jews judged those civil-judicial permissions just as they judged the commandments that instruct the conscience before God — namely thus: God permits this in the Law of Moses, therefore he approves of it; therefore it does not conflict with the will of God either; therefore it also holds good in the conscience before God — God therefore communicated, through Moses himself and afterward through the prophets, many times over, the explanation that those permissions were to be understood politically, not theologically — before the civil tribunal, not before the tribunal of conscience; before the authority, not before God — as though something were, for that reason, no sin before God merely because it is not punished by the authority. From this principle the correct explanation of the statement in Deuteronomy 23 can be derived. For God, as lawgiver in the political commonwealth of Israel, in...