# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S186
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

great minds set out on scientific voyages of discovery in the field of construction-theology, what God "has reserved to his own wisdom and knowledge alone" and has not revealed in his word will nevertheless remain undiscovered and unexplored by them. For example, they will not resolve the apparent contradiction that reason finds in the well-known saying: "Israel, you bring yourself to ruin; for your salvation stands with me alone." (Hosea 13:9.) In the realm of nature, reason is able, though not always, yet quite often, to hit upon the truth through its own inferences; but not so in the realm of divine revelation. And yet the newer theology carries on as though the inferences of reason belonged to it, in this realm, by divine right. Logic, it is said, is something unavoidable; here we bring binding conclusions that our opponents (that is, the "Missourians") cannot escape. If God has said this, the argument runs, then he has necessarily also, at the same time, said that; if God has done this, then he has also done that, or must also do that. But to draw such conclusions, to engage in this kind of "rational talk," was not taught to them by God, but by the prince of darkness. God, who is self-sufficient in everything, depends on nothing. That God, for example, is eternal love does not at all carry as its "necessary consequence" the sending of his only-begotten Son into the world — as though God could not have been love if he had not sent his Son. God would still have been and remained eternal love even if he had not sent his Son into the world; no one could have accused him of lovelessness for failing to send his Son. — I am only to conclude from a word of Scripture what actually lies in it, what is the thought of the scriptural word itself, what it actually contains, what follows from it as though of itself — as, for example, the baptism of women and children follows from the word: Baptize all nations, or all the heathen. Whatever a person finds in Scripture by inferences of reason is either a merely human truth or an error, but never a divine truth. We must therefore quite decisively guard ourselves against all such inferences in the field of theology. The fathers of our church (at whose feet we still sit, now as before, even though we do not follow them where they have erred, for the rule and standard of our faith is not they but God's word alone) demonstrate that a doctrine is an error, a false doctrine, by showing that it is unbiblical and contrary to Scripture. This is what, for example, Johann Gerhard does with regard to chiliasm. He shows that it is a false doctrine, first, because it is not a doctrine of Scripture, and second, because it in fact runs entirely counter to the clear wording of Scripture. — If, then, what we are to accept as divine doctrine is not expressly — even if only indirectly or implicitly — contained