# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1882_S67
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 67 —

when the Calvinists acted so fair and spoke so mildly of the universal gracious will of God. This wording here denies that the dogmaticians used such an expression with the meaning that something good in man is the cause of election, and indeed in the same sense in which it is spoken of in the Book of Concord."

Pastor Muus was then reminded: If we had credited the Fathers with a Pelagian understanding in this expression, we would not have declared repeatedly that we cannot and will not declare the Fathers to be false teachers.

But Pastor Muus declared: "That is what makes the matter quite incomprehensible to me. The old dogmaticians used the expression, it is false, and yet they are not false teachers. But if someone at the present time uses this expression in this doctrine, then he is of course a false teacher. I cannot make sense of that. And this grand declaration of the committee comes over me here like a rope round the neck, when it says: 'With that expression a real explanation is gained only if one makes faith a cause of election and thus something good in man'; and then it is said that it is expressly rejected in the same sense in which it is rejected in the Formula of Concord. Now I should like to put the question further: how do the speakers here in the Synodical Conference know that the present opponents take this expression 'intuitu fidei' in a different sense from the dogmaticians? I am fairly certain that most of the members here are not well acquainted with how very many opponents of Missouri have expressed themselves on this matter. But now they suddenly judge: The opponents take this expression in quite a different sense from the dogmaticians."

To this a member of the Conference replied: So the first question was this, why we do not put the dogmaticians in the same class in which we place our new opponents, although they after all used the same word. To that I say: That is not a question at all that belongs in the Synodical Conference. For how can we expect our laymen to sit in judgment on the nature of the doctrine of Gerhard, Quenstedt and other Fathers! They would be condemned to take our word for it, and perhaps the simple would think of whoever shouted loudest: He will probably be right. We cannot, after all, bring the books here and say: So writes Gerhard, so Quenstedt. We have shown in our periodicals that there is an essential difference between the dogmaticians and the more recent opponents. Where do the old dogmaticians say that it depends on man's conduct? Where do they say that faith is a cause, that one is elected on account of faith? Where do they say: for faith's sake? The word "on account of" however stood in "Altes und Neues" [Old and New, a periodical], and the old writers condemn that as Pelagian heresy. Now Schmidt has it printed as new wisdom, and when