# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S17
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Tenth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1902. 17

...are to be judged. We teach rightly concerning the nature of Christianity.
It is the doctrine of Holy Scripture that Christianity does not consist in
man's "morality" and moral endeavors, but in faith in the forgiveness of sins
which the Son of God, having become man, acquired through his vicarious
doing and suffering and offers in the Gospel to the world. In short, we know
that we are orthodox, rightly believing, not because we are by nature more
clever and wiser than other people, but because by God's grace we believe,
teach, and confess the Word that Christ has given his church.

And with this the fact stands before our eyes that within outward Christendom
we find not general agreement but general hostility. Must this not
discourage us, indeed perhaps unsettle us? Is it not extremely strange that
the truth, the divine truth, does not come to general acknowledgment even
within outward Christendom?

Not in the light of the Word of God and the history of the churches of God
here on earth! The truth, God's revealed truth, has always been a stranger
not only in the world but also in the church — that is, within the outward
bounds of the church. Outward Christendom has, by and large, always set
itself against the divine truth. In the Old Testament the Jews were God's
people set apart from the heathen. Yet God's messengers, who proclaimed the
divine truth, fared, by and large, exceedingly badly among God's people.
Jerusalem killed the prophets and stoned those who were sent to her. "Which
of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted and slain?" Stephen cries
out to the representatives of the Jewish church. And Christ himself, when he
came, could not bring about even an approximately general acknowledgment of
himself within the church. He came unto his own, and his own received him
not. Even the apostles of Christ could obtain no testimonium orthodoxiae
[certificate of right belief] from the Jewish church. Indeed, the Jews in
Rome, even before they had heard Paul, told the apostle: "As concerning this
sect, we know that everywhere it is spoken against."*) And how did it go
afterward? In the time that followed, the witnesses of Jesus were for some
centuries burned and beheaded chiefly by the heathen; but then the
so-called Christian church, the church of the pope, took over this role. The
woman was made drunk with the blood — not of the unholy, but of the saints,
and with the blood not so much of false teachers as of the witnesses of
Jesus.**) In the Reformation, God indeed made mighty room for his Word
within outward Christendom. But even then general acknowledgment of the
divine truth did not come about. By far the greatest part of the

*) Acts 28:22.                                       **) Rev. 17:6.

[Signature at the foot of the page: "2" — a printer's sheet signature, not a
folio.]