# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S177
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Fourth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States. 1884.   177

it is therefore comparatively less well known. Now if a Christian is troubled about it, if the apparent contradiction in this doctrine is shown to him in a distorted light, it can easily happen — as has unfortunately happened with many dear Christians — that he takes the pure doctrine of gracious election, because of its apparent contradiction, for a new doctrine not revealed in God's word, one that he must resist accepting with hands and feet. — We repeat: the relation in which the doctrine of the Holy Trinity stands to human reason is by no means different, but exactly the same, as the relation in which the doctrine of gracious election, taken together with the doctrine of God's universal gracious will, stands to human reason. In both doctrines reason finds the very same apparent contradiction: it gets no further past it in the doctrine of the Trinity than it does in the doctrine of gracious election. — Just as, in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity — dear as our salvation is to us — we must simply hold to the statement of the word of Scripture, refrain from all inferences of our own reason, and let the contradiction that appears to our reason stand unresolved, the same must also happen in the doctrine of gracious election, if we wish to be and remain rightly believing Lutherans. — The matter would, of course, stand differently if one could produce proof that between the doctrines of gracious election and the universal gracious will there existed not merely an apparent but an actual contradiction. — An apparent contradiction arises when Holy Scripture states something about a divine mystery that our reason cannot reconcile with the object of that mystery, because that object is not fully known to us. A true contradiction, by contrast, exists when, in one and the same matter — and indeed in one and the same respect — something is at one time asserted and then that very thing is denied again, or the reverse. Thus it would, for example, be a true contradiction if it were said: there is one God, and at the same time — in the same respect — it were also said: there are three Gods. Contradictions of this real and true kind are not found in Holy Scripture.

No doctrine of Holy Scripture stands in any actual contradiction with another. This is as certainly impossible as it is certain that Scripture is the word of the truthful God. If, therefore, I have shown that for the doctrine I hold I have a sure and definite word of Scripture, I have thereby shown that it stands not in contradiction, but in fullest harmony, with every other doctrine of Scripture; how so? — that is not my business, but God's. Even if we cannot reconcile this or that with each other — "which we are also not commanded to do" (Concordienf. M. S. 715) — our God can do it nonetheless. He reconciles everything most excellently. John Gerhard: "The judgment concerning a true contra-