# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1859_S11
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to the 1859 Volume. 11

""To wish to understand divine things by means of philosophy is to grasp
a glowing iron not with tongs but with the fingers."" Moreover, the
philosopher does not put forward those qualifications and
interpretations as a philosopher, out of the principles of his own
science — for that science knows nothing of the divine mysteries, so
how should it limit its axioms for their sake? — but as a Christian, or
rather as a theologian, out of the principles of theology; and therefore
these are no longer philosophical, but in a certain respect theological,
axioms. But why should we wish to introduce that mixing of theology
with philosophy, which was once the source of all evil in the church?
Why should we, as it were, invite scholastic theology — which the
blessed Luther drove out with such great toil and labor — to return to
our church, and set it back with applause upon the theological chair?
Is it not better and more advisable to leave it to philosophy to
explain, qualify, and harmonize its own axioms by the light of nature,
and to treat of the divine mysteries — which surpass all reason and
philosophy — solely from the revealed Word? Our view is this: if those
philosophical axioms which are brought forward by opponents to combat
the heavenly truth can be qualified and explained from the principles of
philosophy itself, then we are not opposed to such qualifications and
explanations. If, for example, from the philosophical axiom, "That
property which makes a thing what it is (the proprium) cannot be
communicated to another," one disputes the real communication of the
divine attributes that has taken place to the human nature of Christ,
then the axiom is rightly qualified from the principles of philosophy
itself, in that one distinguishes between a communication κατὰ μέθεξιν
[by participation] and κατὰ σύνδυασιν [by conjunction], and shows the
contrary by the examples of a glowing iron and an ensouled body. But if
such axioms are brought forward as cannot be qualified and explained
from the principles of philosophy, then it is better to refer them back
to the philosophical sphere and simply reject them outright in
disputation concerning the highest mysteries of faith, rather than to
explain them by extensive qualifications — so that the disputation may
be shortened, and the opponents themselves, against their own will,
driven to the proper principle in the discussion of such mysteries,
namely to Holy Scripture. If, for example, a Photinian argues thus: "The
personal property in the Father is either the same as his essence, or
it is real" (that is, actual, not merely according to the relations in
which our mind considers it), "distinct from the same

*) The former occurs, namely, when one being passes over into another,
so that it partakes of the latter's properties (a communication which
does not take place in Christ); the latter occurs when one being is so
united with the other that, while no mingling takes place, yet by
virtue of it a participation in the other's properties arises (which is
what has occurred in Christ). D. R.