# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1874_S8
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 8 —

For this reason we also need not fear the consequences drawn from the Augsburg Confession at all, because they are nothing other than the developed content of this Confession itself. After Luther's death many false spirits came forward with their errors, which had already been judged by the consequences of the Augsburg Confession. Calvin had not yet appeared in 1530, yet he was already condemned by the 10th Article of the Augustana, namely by the consequences resulting from it. Again, when the Augsburg Confession teaches that Christ is God and man in one person, the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, that is, of the communication of attributes, although not expressly stated, is nevertheless so clearly indicated that a correct inference draws it out of necessity. And so it is with the whole Augsburg Confession. So, for example, the universal priesthood of all true Christians is not expressly mentioned in the Augsburg Confession either, and yet it is confessed along with it by the very fact that the doctrine of Christian freedom, of justification, of the Church as the assembly of all believers and saints, etc., is confessed.

The Iowa Synod, for instance, is therefore caught in a gross error when it will allow to count in the Confession as such only what, as it expresses it, is said in it "confessingly" [bekennend], that is, what demonstrably lay directly in the intention of the fathers to confess!

Even in Holy Scripture not all doctrines are so stated in express words that they need not first be drawn out by inference. Thus the word Trinity [Dreieinigkeit] does not stand in Holy Scripture in express words; but there it stands: the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God; it stands likewise in Scripture: the Father is another, the Son is another, the Holy Spirit is another; finally it is also testified throughout the whole of Scripture that there is only one God. From this the ancient Church, against the Antitrinitarians, drew the logical conclusion: therefore God is a triune God; and it did not tolerate the Antitrinitarians, who would not grant this consequence, as people who reject a clear fundamental doctrine of Scripture. In a similar way it stands with the Augsburg Confession. By the principle Ex veris nonnisi verum, that is, from the truth follow no lies, we need not fear the consequences drawn from it.

If we are reproached here with going beyond the Symbols, that does not hold. For to draw consequences from the Symbols is not to go beyond the Symbols. It would indeed be dreadful if a synod wished to set up new conditions of church fellowship that had been such neither explicite (expressly) nor implicite (by inclusion) before. But that we do not do at all.