# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1872_S51
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 51 —

all eternity. Yet upon this rests all our hope in life, in suffering, and in death, in time and in eternity. If this is not true, then Christians are the greatest fools, and the devils must mock them for all eternity. But no — we know: Jesus Christ is the Lord of glory, the Prince of life, and that is what he was even while he walked the earth in the form of a servant, and that is what he will remain for all eternity. This the moderns deny — and it is the very best of their theologians who do so. A spirit of darkness has simply been poured out over them, so that they do not see what they have abandoned. They think the nineteenth century demands this of them and that they must keep pace with it, since it makes different demands of theologians than the age of the Reformation did. They have ceased to be children who must first learn the wisdom of the fathers — indeed, of the heavenly Father — before they know anything; and so the word applies to them: "Except ye be converted, and become as little children" [Matt. 18:3], etc. Delitzsch — otherwise so zealous, learned, and indeed pious a man — is nevertheless so blinded that he dares to write, with his own unfortunate hand, that one cannot rely on an Old Testament passage being rightly interpreted merely because an apostle or evangelist interpreted it that way! The old, godly Brenz said, on the contrary: if Paul had interpreted a passage, then cursed be anyone who claims that this was not the Holy Spirit's own interpretation. Nowadays people say: oh no, that would be a great prejudice, to believe one must simply accept it without further ado — the apostle could just as easily have erred there himself; he merely made an application, and so on. And it is in such a time as this that God has given us pure Lutheran doctrine and preserved it among us until now! — What was the state of the Lutheran Church in Germany at the time our Synod was founded? In the schools there were teachers who believed neither in God nor that there was a devil. From the pulpits, the most insipid rationalism was proclaimed. That Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of the world was something one scarcely heard from anyone anymore; instead it was: "practice always faithfulness and honesty unto your cool grave" [a line from a well-known secular moral verse, not Scripture] — and the universities were the breeding grounds of this plague. Now consider the great miracle God worked, that he brought us — preachers who grew up and were trained in such times — to pure Lutheran doctrine. One member remarked: we had been made very apprehensive and warned against the Missourians and their spirit; that our throats would be throttled by them. And was it any wonder that people who had grown up in such times, and now came over to us, fled from us, or at least deeply distrusted us? And yet we have won congregation after congregation, and they have received pure Lutheran doctrine. It is a true miracle of God's mercy that he has thus led us out of the swamp and set us upon a rock. For this we should rejoice! — Let us now turn to America. How did things stand here? We cannot deny it: when our Synod began, there was no proper Lutheran synod here, except perhaps