# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1859_S3
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to the 1859 Volume. 3

"and the more plausible a color it lends to errors," etc.*) We do not
reject the service, but the dominion, of philosophy in the realm of
revelation; we do not reject the formal, but the material use of
philosophy. And even the material use we reject only with respect to
those concepts which are drawn solely from revelation. But our old
teachers have written better on this than we are able to do. We will
therefore let them speak.

Thus, for example, Johann Gerhard writes:

"The use of philosophy in theology is threefold: an organic use (serving
as a tool), a constructive use (serving to prove), and a refutative use
(serving to refute). The organic use extends the furthest; for the sake
of doctrinal presentation it can be reduced to certain main topics; but
in order to understand the matter rightly, we must first set forth the
division of the philosophical sciences. They are divided, namely, into
instrumental and real philosophy. To instrumental philosophy belong
logic and rhetoric (grammar belongs to the science of language); to real
philosophy belong, in part, theoretical sciences such as metaphysics,
physics, and mathematics, and in part practical ones, such as ethics,
politics, and economics. 1. As regards all the parts of philosophy taken
together, both the real and the instrumental in general, we say that
knowledge of them awakens, sharpens, and prepares the mind of man, and
gives him the aptitude to proceed more unhindered and with less effort
in every study of the higher disciplines — a preparatory benefit which
they render also to the future theologian. 2. As regards the individual
parts of real philosophy in particular, we say that knowledge of them is
useful to theology in the explanation of certain terms (terminorum).
Theology, however, makes use of a twofold kind of terms; some are found
according to the letter in Scripture, and these are called biblical;
others have been adopted by ecclesiastical writers and teachers, and are
found not according to the letter, but according to the sense, in
Scripture, and are therefore called ecclesiastical. In each of the two
kinds there occur some for whose more precise explanation philosophy
contributes something. Thus the words thing, good, true, perfect,
finite, infinite, person, existence, essence, actuality, possibility,
and so forth, are terms drawn from metaphysics, and hence a knowledge of
metaphysics can also contribute something to their explanation. Time,
place, heaven, earth, sea, fire, snow, hail, rain, faculties of the
soul, and so forth, are terms of physics, and hence the theologian
derives their explanation from physics. Of the journeys of the
patriarchs,

*) See the Introduction to the Religious Controversies within the
Evangelical Lutheran Church, by Walch, vol. IV, p. 518. Cf. Buddeus's
Isagoge, p. 259, on Wenceslaus Schilling, who renewed Hofmann's campaign
against every use, especially of metaphysics.