# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1905_S15
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

11th Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1905. 15

Christians should carefully avoid, according to the apostle's instruction: "Mark them which cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned, and avoid them."*) To score a point against us, we are said to teach that the Missouri Synod is the only church that saves. Just last year a German periodical, which lets itself be informed by our American opponents, wrote as much: "In St. Louis sits enthroned the one true Lutheran church. Whoever is not with it has only the choice of submitting or being eternally lost."**)

The fathers of our Synod, and we as well, have held and still hold that the old teachers of our church — Luther especially, and the teachers of the 16th century — are better guides than the newer theologians who call themselves Lutheran. To score a point against us, it has been said that we practice man-worship with Luther and the old theologians, that we merely warm up again the doctrines and teaching methods of the fathers, and that we speak up for a dead orthodoxism.

On a few points, old Lutheran teachers — especially those of the 17th and 18th centuries — departed from the doctrine taught in Holy Scripture and attested by our church's pure confession: so in the doctrine of the Sunday [sabbath], of the authority of civil government, and of the election of grace [predestination]. On these points we have remained with Holy Scripture and the Lutheran confession, and have not followed the teachers who went astray here. To score a point against us, it has been said, and is still said, that we dishonor the fathers.

We teach, concerning a person's conversion and salvation, that all people who are converted and saved owe this solely and alone to the grace of God in Christ — and not even to the smallest degree to their better conduct, their lesser resistance, their lesser guilt, and so on. Concerning non-conversion, on the other hand, and being lost, we teach that these have their ground solely and alone in the guilt of the person, in their resistance to the working of the Holy Spirit, and not in any lack of God's grace. This is what the fathers of our Synod, and we together with them, have constantly taught and still teach. To score a point against us, the untruth is spread about us to this very day that we taught that God does not seriously will to save all people, but rather

*) Romans 16:17.
**) The periodical "Der Alte Glaube" [The Old Faith], August 26, 1904.