# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S166
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

166   Doctrinal Proceedings of the 19th General [Synod], or

that speak of it. "Whom he did foreknow" now had to mean: "whose persevering faith he foreknew," and so on. — It thus lies plainly before our eyes: the opponents' procedure rests on setting aside the word of Scripture in the interest of one's own thoughts, formed apart from the word of Scripture.

At the same time, people fought against the explicit word of Scripture with so-called necessary inferences. It was said: if one accepted the doctrine that election, as a cause, precedes the faith and Christian state of the elect, it would follow that God does not seriously will to save all people. For the sake of this necessary consequence, the doctrine that election is a cause of faith had to be abandoned. In fact, it was only with these so-called necessary inferences that our doctrine was combated. Many were unsettled and confused by such objections; some, certainly, were led away from the truth into apostasy by them alone. The opposing side wrote explicitly: "If correct and necessary inferences from a stated doctrine are false, this proves unanswerably that the doctrine itself is false." And that inferences of reason are meant here is clear from the following statement of the opponents: "If people will not allow what is logically implied in their statements, they should abandon their positions or modify them." (Col. Mag. No. 3, 1881.) This demand, too, rests on the presupposition that the individual Christian doctrines hang together according to reason, and it has the practical effect that the explicit word of Scripture is set aside under the pretense of wanting a self-consistent whole. Let the situation be pictured clearly: Holy Scripture, at all the passages that speak explicitly of election, speaks of election in such a way that faith, and indeed the whole Christian state of the elect, appears as an effect of their eternal election. Over against this, however, people come and say that this doctrine cannot be admitted, for otherwise it would follow that God does not will to bring all people to faith and save them. For the sake, then, of an inference that human reason believes it must draw, the explicit word of Scripture is abandoned, and out of passages that have nothing at all to do with election, such as "He that believeth shall be saved," people construct for themselves a doctrine of election that seems to human reason to fit with other doctrines. — Does Scripture, in this, still remain the source from which the articles of faith are drawn, and the rule by which the articles of faith are judged? By no means! Here again we have rationalism! It is no longer Scripture that sets forth the articles of faith; rather, in fact, human reason gives each article its own particular shape every time. What form an article of faith must take is, in the last resort, decided by human reason according to its own