# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1959_S28
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

28 DOCTRINAL ESSAY

The principle “Scripture alone” means also for us as Lutherans
that Scripture is its own interpreter; not the wisdom of men, not
the mind of the interpreter who dares to rise above Scripture and
dictate to Scripture what it must mean; least of all an ecclesiastical
authority which presumes to be able to determine with absolute
certainty the intended meaning of difficult Scripture passages.
And when we say “Scripture alone,” we are also saying: Scripture
in its immediate and most obvious sense, regardless of whether
that sense meets or does not meet the approval of the interpreter.
Thus no one has the right arbitrarily to excise or expurgate por-
tions of Scripture as though he were editing for high school students
a novel by Walter-Scott or Washington Irving. No one has the
right to interpolate, or repartition, or rearrange sections of a Bib-
lical book to suit his own fancy. Least of all is it within the right
of anyone to empty the text of Scripture of its obvious meaning on
the grounds that thought patterns of Scripture are couched in
ancient and no longer intelligible mythological terms, and to fill
those emptied words with other meanings suggested by the mind
of the interpreter. The Lutheran interpreter must therefore reject
the following views and practices:

1. co-ordinating with Scripture “ecclesiastical tradition”;

2. placing any authority — popes, councils, or symbols — above
Scripture;

3. viewing Scripture as the record of the natural evolution of
the faith of Israel and the early church;

. viewing Scripture as a book of inferences made by men from
God’s mighty acts;

. all views which regard the prophetic and apostolic Word as
no more than a unique but fallible, human witness to revela-
tion;

. failure to acknowledge the organic unity and essential
Christocentricity of the Old and the New Testament;

- all attempts to get beyond or away from the “plain sense”
of Scripture by means of allegorical, demythological, or
existential methods of interpretation.

. arbitrary excision, interpolation, or emendation of the text;

. every interpretation of Scripture which is not in accord with
Scripture’s central teaching, namely, justification by faith
in Christ; ‘

. failure to hear Scripture on its own terms and in its own
categories by the attempt to make it conform to a pre-
conceived system of thought;

- abuse of the recognition that Scripture employs literary

types by arbitrarily assigning certain sections of Scripture
to myth or legend.

: These eleven theses are a summary compiled by Merrill Kluhsman
for my course Sola Scriptura. (Spring quarter, 1958—59)

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