# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S181
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Fourth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States. 1884.   181

done, then war of all against all breaks out among the articles of faith; then a monster is made out of Christian doctrine; then we would finally have to become Jews, heathens, and Turks. The first articles to fall would be those about the Holy Trinity and the person of Christ; for to satisfy human reason here, there is no way to reconcile, on the one hand, the statements of Scripture that God is a single, wholly undivided and indivisible being, with, on the other hand, the statements of Scripture that there are three distinct persons. If reason tries to remove the apparent contradiction found in these statements, it can only do so by denying either the threeness of the persons or the oneness of the being — as the church father Tertullian says of Praxias: "He thinks he can believe in one God only if he says that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one and the same." — If reason tries to mediate between the statements, on the one hand, that Christ is true God, and, on the other, that Christ is true man, it can only do so by denying either the true deity or the true humanity — that is, by denying the incarnation of the Son of God altogether. Luther shows this with powerful words: "Christ requires that we become like children if we are ever to enter the kingdom of heaven at all — that is, just as in children reason and understanding count for nothing and are, so to speak, entirely buried away, so in all Christian believers reason, too, must be put to death; otherwise faith has no place in them, for reason fights against faith. For example, Scripture says there is but one God, and yet in that one divine being there are three distinct persons — God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit — but one being and substance. At this point the Turk at once comes along with his reason and asks how it could possibly be that one could be three and three could be one; they say that a single household can have no more than one master and one head, so likewise in heaven there can only be one God. That is all spoken out of reason. But here you as a Christian must become a child and say: I cannot make sense of it, but I must become a child and let myself be carried, let Christ touch and bless me, and believe — while shutting reason's eyes and not looking to see how it could be possible or impossible, but believing the plain, simple word and accepting it. — And so it goes with all the other articles of faith as well. When the heathen hear that God's natural Son became man, they say: That is not possible. Indeed — if one asks reason for advice. But here you must let reason go, know nothing from it, and put it entirely to death, or else you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. These things cannot be grasped or understood by reason; you must believe the article that Christ was born a man, when the time