# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1899_S23
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Ninth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1899. 23

and the church's slight influence, etc. Insofar as this complaint is
justified, the fact complained of has its ground in this: that the
church — and what calls itself such — has abandoned its strength,
God's word, or at least does not properly assert it. The danger of
failing to recognize God's word and its power, and of reaching
instead for other means of church-building, is great at all times and
among all Christians, since flesh and blood always find it hard to
accept the way in which God builds and preserves his church here on
earth.

It may therefore be fitting that we too, at this general church
assembly, once again call to mind, in a few main points, what we as a
church have in God's word. Let me, then, briefly treat the theme:

The Church and God's Word.

I should like to direct our attention here to four points.
1. The church really has God's word;
2. this word has divine power;
3. with this word the church can accomplish everything
   commanded of it;
4. there is therefore, properly speaking, only one danger
   for the church: the danger of falling away from God's word.

1.

The church really has God's word, not merely a human word. God has
equipped his church on earth with nothing less than his own divine
word. We must sharply distinguish the word that God has given his
church from every human word.

To be sure, even the merely human word — human language and speech —
is God's creature and a gift of God to mankind. Human language and
speech are not an invention of the human mind; they are not the
product of a natural development of creatures from a lower to a
higher stage, as unreasonable natural scientists — and even foolish
theologians — have supposed. No, human language and speech belong to
the divine endowment given to man at his creation. They are a
creature of God's hand, like every other creature that God's creative
word has called into being and sustains in being. For although man
has fallen, and by his fall would well have deserved that God should
also make him mute, deaf, and blind, God in his great goodness has
nevertheless left to fallen mankind, along with its other natural
gifts, the gift of human language and speech as well. And that is
truly a great gift. Luther says: "Of all the gifts of God, speech is
the most beautiful and glorious, by which alone man is distinguished
from all other animals