“It is certainly true that one should teach nothing outside of Scripture pertaining to divine matters, as St Hilary writes in On the Trinity Book I, which means only that one should teach nothing that is at variance with Scripture. But that one should not use more or other words than those contained in Scripture–this cannot be adhered to, especially in a controversy and when heretics want to falsify things with trickery and distort the words of Scripture. It thus became necessary to condense the meaning of Scripture, comprised of so many passages, into a short and comprehensive word, and to ask whether [the Arians] regarded Christ as homoousios, which was the meaning of all the words of Scripture that they had distorted with false interpretations among their own people, but had freely confessed before the emperor and the council. It is just as if the Pelagians were to try to embarrass us with the term ‘original sin’ or ‘Adam’s plague’ because these words do not occur in Scripture, though Scripture clearly teaches the meaning of these words, that we are ‘conceived in sin’ (Ps 51.5), that we are ‘by nature children of wrath’ (Eph 2.3), and that we must all be accounted sinners ‘because of the sin of one man’ (Rom 5.12).”
Luther, On the Councils and the Church (LW 41, pp. 83-84)
