# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S174
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

on its own principles, but on the statement of Scripture that Christ's body is a true body. I answer: one must not hear Scripture only on the one point, that Christ has a true body, but also on the other, that Christ's true body is present in the Supper. The rule of faith is to be accepted whole. The question here is not whether Christ's body is a true body, but this: whether, from the fact that Christ's body is a true body, it may rightly be concluded that God cannot bring it about that this true body be present in the Supper. You say: the nature of a body does not allow it; a body is finite. I ask: how do they know that it contradicts Christ's body to be present in several places at once? Certainly from principles of reason, for Scripture says the opposite. The whole argument, then, ultimately comes down to a statement of reason." (Loc. cit. § 178.)

Applying what has been said here and in the preceding citations to the claim that the doctrine of election to faith and salvation conflicts with Scripture — that its statement about God's universal gracious will cannot bear taking those passages that speak of election according to their wording — anyone can now easily work out for himself.

Do we, then, having refused to "rhyme together" the clear statements of God's word by our own devising, and having refused to infer one article from another by reason, end up with a disconnected, self-contradictory faith? — as has been held against us. Far from it. All the articles of our most holy faith stand assuredly in wonderful accord, in the most exact agreement with one another, and form — to use the opponents' own expression for once — a "harmonious whole." As in God himself, so also in the doctrines revealed by him there is the fullest harmony. Any claim to the contrary we call blasphemy. Scripture itself indicates the most intimate coherence of the whole of Christian doctrine by placing Christ at its center. When St. Paul gives as the sum of his preaching, "We preach Christ crucified," he thereby says that the doctrine of Christ's person and work is the central doctrine from which all other doctrines proceed and with which all doctrines stand in the most inward connection. But we do not, for all that, hold the individual doctrines of Holy Scripture to be a "whole" in the sense that human reason understands a whole. We human beings do not, in this life, have such insight into the inner coherence of the divine doctrines that, once given one doctrine, we could derive all the other doctrines from that single doctrine by the help of logic. If, for example, I hear that God will have all men to be saved, I do not yet thereby know what the doctrine of eternal election is like. That is why God the Holy Spirit has