# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S175
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Fourth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States. 1884.   175

not given us, in Holy Scripture, merely general principles from which we ourselves would have to derive the individual doctrines, and has not revealed merely one doctrine or another from which all the other doctrines would have to be found out by ourselves; rather, God — because it was absolutely necessary for us — has set before us every single doctrine we are to believe in at least one explicit word of Scripture. What folly it is, then, to want to work out by reason what nevertheless lies revealed in Scripture and cannot be worked out by us at all. — This great folly was presented in a vivid way by a member of the Synod, in the following story: Once there were four blind men. They had heard of an elephant. To get an idea of this animal, they went to its owner and said to him: Show us your elephant. Their request was granted. Since they could not see, they tried to form an idea of the elephant by their sense of touch. The first of these blind men grasped the animal's trunk. From this notion he arrived, by the inferences he then drew, at the idea: an elephant is like a snake. The second of the blind men had gotten hold of one of the elephant's legs. From this notion he concluded: an elephant is like the pestle of an oil mill. The third got one of the animal's ear-flaps into his hands. As a result, he was certain: an elephant is like a fan. The fourth blind man, finally, had taken hold of the elephant's tail, and as a result at once concluded: an elephant is like a big rice-pounder. What these people had actually gotten hold of was indeed the real thing, but through their mistaken inferences each of them had, according to what he happened to grasp and his own capacity to form ideas, arrived at — as one can see — an entirely false idea of the elephant. — Luther powerfully lashes this kind of inference-mongering, which draws conclusions beyond God's explicit word. He writes: "But the very finest point in the Bishop's (of Meissen) circular is that the parish priests are to teach the people how, under the one kind, the whole of Jesus Christ, God's Son, God and man, together with his body and blood, is present and is eaten and drunk by the laity. ... To this is now added the doctrine of concomitance, that is, the inference. Because Christ's body is not without blood, it follows that his blood is not without a soul; from that it follows that his soul is not without the Godhead; from that it follows that his Godhead is not without the Father and the Holy Spirit; from that it follows that in the sacrament, even under one kind, the soul of Christ, the Holy Trinity, is eaten and drunk together with his body and blood; from that it follows that a mass-priest, in every single mass, sacrifices and sells the Holy Trinity twice over; from that it follows, since the Godhead is not without the creature, that heaven and earth too must be in the sacrament; from that it follows that the devils and hell too are in the sacrament; from that it follows that whoever [receives] the sacrament