# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1874_S11
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 11 —

to logical inference it is absolutely necessary that the premises be correct. Otherwise one cannot possibly conclude correctly. If one wished, for example, to conclude: All men are mortal — Christ is a man — therefore Christ is mortal — everyone readily sees that this is a false inference. But where then lies the fault? In the premises. For in the major there is a concept: descended from Adam according to the flesh, conceived and born in sins, which is left out in the minor. So it is mostly because the major is either not wholly true or is at least ambiguous. Often something is true only secundum quid (in a certain respect). Then, in order to conclude logically, one must make the same restriction in the minor also. Such a separation of the formal process of thought from the correctness of the premises is therefore quite inadmissible. If one applied logical inference only to the formal process of thought and not also to the correctness of the premises, what terrible consequences that would have! Consider only: our whole Catechism, our whole dogmatics, so far as both do not contain words of Scripture, are nothing other than consequences drawn from Holy Scripture. If one now sets up a true and a false proposition as premises, one cannot conclude correctly. The word "logically" [folgerichtig] here presupposes rather that both the premises and the conclusio are in order, since we speak here only of such premises as contain a biblical truth. Not only the form of the inference, but also the matter of the entire syllogism must be correct.

A question whether in the 5th Thesis it ought to speak only of a stubborn denial of individual consequences was answered thus: This Thesis does not so much take account of the conduct toward those who deny individual correctly drawn conclusions; it wishes rather to set up a generally valid principle. This principle is: Whoever denies that the truths that follow logically by consequence from the Augsburg Confession are binding is no member of the Lutheran Church. This sense of the Thesis could in any case be inferred even from the words: "is no true member of the Lutheran Church." But in order that this sense also be stated quite unmistakably in the Thesis itself, the beginning of the Thesis was, by unanimous resolution, formulated thus: "Even he who denies the binding force of the conclusions arising from the words of this Confession, etc." This alteration seemed all the more necessary since surely no one will go so far as to deny the Lutheran name to all those who perhaps do not acknowledge some doctrine that lies somehow on the periphery of the doctrinal articles of the Augsburg Confession. But whoever on principle denies the binding force of the consequences from the Augsburg Confession proves thereby that he is no Lutheran, but a fox, who does not accept even the Confession itself sincerely.