# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S179
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Fourth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States. 1884.   179

statements of Holy Scripture. We want to have and keep before our eyes only what is actually present in the individual statements of Scripture. That way our theology truly remains a theology of Scripture, and we can be certain that we are not forming a false picture of God and divine things.

Our method is called mechanical and unscientific. But is it really mechanical work to look at the express word of Scripture — the word of the great and majestic God, which he has revealed to us out of pure grace? To behold the word of Scripture is to behold God himself, so far as God can be beheld by human beings at all in this life; to behold the word of Scripture is to behold the divine light that shines in this darkness, and to be illuminated by that light. — And is our procedure supposed to be unscientific because we want to speak of divine things only on the basis of the express word of Scripture? — Not so fast! We proceed more scientifically than those construction-theologians. For it is more scientific to confess one's ignorance than to make a show of knowledge one does not have. What, after all, is the capacity of man to perceive and judge spiritual things? Holy Scripture says not only of the natural man that he understands nothing of the Spirit of God, that it is foolishness to him and he cannot know it, because it must be spiritually discerned — it also admonishes the reborn believer to keep bringing his reason continually into captivity to the obedience of Christ. And yet, in building up Christian doctrine by means of reason, people act as though reason had seen through everything belonging to the Spirit to its very foundation and grasped it with perfect clarity. To act this way is certainly not to act scientifically! Such a procedure is, in fact, thoroughly reprehensible even from the standpoint of scholarship itself. It is, in short, folly. If, in this so-called scientific procedure, pieces of divine truth still come to light, that happens only because the word of Scripture has not yet been entirely forgotten, and the word of Scripture asserts itself against the method. Whatever one actually finds apart from Scripture is nothing but error; that is as certain as the fact that man of himself understands nothing of spiritual things. As a certain modern writer said of the "German professor" who brings everything into "an intelligible system" — that he "stuffs" the supposed gaps in the structure of the world "with his nightcaps and scraps of dressing gown" — so too the "scientific theologians" fill the supposed gaps between the statements of Scripture not with divine truth but with thoughts and notions entirely their own. — "Quid sacer codex nisi speculum, in quo sese Numen depinxit?" (Holy Scripture is only a mirror in which God has drawn his image for us.) So rightly says Dannhauer Herm. s. p. 2. Let us beware of trying to touch up this picture! Some of its lines seem to us to run