# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S8
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

8 Proceedings of the tenth convention

to expound Holy Scripture, well for him! For that is the greatest gift. But let him consider well that he must not rely in a fleshly way on this gift of his, as if everything he says were from the Holy Spirit. No, he must now compare whether his exposition also agrees with the articles of the Christian faith. What does not agree with them he must reject.

Now consider well the scope of 1 Thess. 5:20. First, it says this: Do not say, I shall not go to church, I have the pure fountain, my Bible, at home; who knows what the preacher will bring me? No, Paul would say, do go to church and do not despise the man. God has made the arrangement that men are to expound God's Word to us. Therefore, secondly, do not despise the books of godly teachers either, in which Scripture is expounded. Otherwise you are shameful despisers of the most precious gift. Yes, the more powerful and mighty an expositor is, the more highly one values him. To be sure, the apostle then adds: "But test everything." But this latter does not exclude the former, but includes it. If he is a right expositor, he surely does not bring it about that I depart from Scripture; he does not lead me out of Scripture but into it. For now I am to see, with Scripture in hand: is he right, or are his expositions human thoughts? Therefore do not despise either the writings of the old believing Church Fathers, the writings of a Luther, Chemnitz, Quenstedt, Gerhard, H. Müller and others. Otherwise you are disobedient to the Holy Spirit, who commands you: "Do not despise prophecy."

This applies especially to the writings of our dear Father Luther. Whoever studies Luther diligently will not regard it as partisanship or narrow-mindedness when we say: The most glorious books after Holy Scripture are the writings of Luther. No one in the Church has expounded Scripture so gloriously and so powerfully as Luther, and not merely in the writings in which he set out to write on this or that chapter of the Bible; rather, everywhere in his writings there is found an unsurpassed exposition of Scripture, also in the polemical writings. Indeed, precisely there it was especially a matter of proving his doctrine so that even the most acute and most venomous opponent had to admit: he is right. And that is just what an exposition according to Scripture really is; not everyone whose exposition is correct therefore has this greatest of all gifts, but only the one who understands how to make it so clear to his hearers that this and no other can be the sense of this passage, that they must say: yes, I cannot do otherwise, I must agree with him. A good expositor is therefore not, as the newer exegetes think, one who merely gives a word its meaning according to the rules of language and in doing so asks little or nothing about the sense of the Holy Spirit. Let such a man, because he knows Latin, Greek and Hebrew, think all he likes: I am a great expositor; he is really nothing but a book-