# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1899_S18
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

18 Proceedings of the 24th General, or

and daughter. Over what? Over the Prince of Peace — strife against
Jesus and his word. For it is he and his word, after all, on which
humanity actually splits into two parts. It is precisely the word of
peace, the gospel, that is the occasion and the object of the most
dreadful war between brother and brother. Oh, what could be more
terrible!

We may rightly ask, then, how is this possible, how does it happen,
that precisely the sweetest message of peace stirs up the bitterest
war? The answer is: this word has something altogether peculiar
about it. It tolerates no neutrality. It leaves no hearer as he was.
It makes him either a friend and child of God, or else an enemy of
God. Whomever it does not win over, it hardens. — One might take
this for something self-contradictory and therefore impossible. But
something similar already occurs in nature. It is, after all, the same
sun that softens fine wax and yet hardens the mud in the street. The
same medicine heals one man and kills another. One and the same
magnet attracts and repels. Spurned love turns into hatred. — But
that, of course, does not yet explain the so very different effect of
the word of God. For wax and mud, this sick man and that other one,
are, after all, of an entirely different nature from the very start. The
persons to whom God's word comes, by contrast, are by nature entirely
and completely alike in their relation to God and his word. "There is
no difference; they are all sinners," etc. — Nor does it help to say:
it is not really God but man himself who hardens himself. For we
read: "God hardened Pharaoh." Nor does it help just as little to say:
man indeed hardens himself at the word, but not through the word. For
the gospel, by its own testimony, is not merely a fragrance from life
to life, but also from death to death. And that surely means: it
hardens those who despise it. Indeed, Christ himself is set "for the
fall and rising" [of many]. Does he not also say in the plainest
words: "I came into this world for judgment, that those who do not
see may see, and that those who see may become blind"? — Let us,
then, simply not try to make this mystery clear and acceptable to our
reason! Let us hold simply to what — indeed to all that — Holy
Scripture says about it. So: man indeed hardens himself; but then God
gives him over to a depraved mind. He indeed hardens himself at the
gospel; but according to God's holy punitive will, it is precisely the
gospel through which he is hardened. And if God is truly God, then
absolutely nothing at all can happen against his will, or even without
it.

Since this is so, and will remain so until the end of the world, let
none of us hope either that there will be universal peace before the
Last Day, or even that he, at least for his own person,