# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S9
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1884. 9

learner. With Luther it is quite different. There one notices (though not always at once): Luther is thorough and deep. He proceeds slowly, but in such a way that the matter becomes ever brighter, ever clearer, ever more distinct. He strikes with the hammer always on the same spot, but hits the nail on the head, so that it gradually goes in ever deeper. Some years ago even a Catholic French priest admitted to me that all the theologians in the Roman Church put together had not proved so clearly and so convincingly as Luther that the body of Christ is present in the Lord's Supper; here he had not yet been equaled by any of their most learned men. A good expositor compels his hearers to fall in with him. But he does not have this glorious gift who brings his hearers no further than to say: Well, it will probably be right as he says; he is, after all, a pure teacher. Such a man will not bring forth among his hearers the fruit that he achieves who compels them to acknowledge the correctness of his exposition without contradiction. And that is just the case with Luther. To be sure, the wretched Zwingli judged of Luther after the Colloquy [Marburg, 1529] that he had been able to do nothing more than write the words on the table with chalk, and that whenever he, Zwingli, had made his objections, Luther had only pointed again and again to the table: Do you not see the words there: This is my body? How ridiculous that is will be admitted by everyone who knows Luther's speeches, who, in his theological boldness, after a conducted proof could even go so far as to say: Christ would have to have been drunk if he had spoken thus at the Supper: "This is my body," when his body was in fact absent from the Supper.

Therefore he cannot be acknowledged as a venerator of the Bible who says: What are human writings! I read no other books at all than the Bible — because he thrusts away from himself the command of the Holy Spirit in the Bible: "Do not despise prophecy."

Calov, in his *Biblia illustrata*, also testifies that in 1 Thess. 5 "prophecy" means nothing other than the exposition of Scripture. His words are as follows: "Paul writes: 'Do not despise prophecy,' 1 Thess. 5:20. By prophecy he does not understand the foretelling of future things; for who knows that there were such prophets there? but the exposition of Scripture, which is so called out of honor, and so that both dignity and authority may be procured for good expositors of Scripture, not in order that they should be put on a level with the prophets who, by the impulse of the Holy Spirit, foretell future things or also deliver divine mysteries from divine inspiration, such as the extraordinary prophets of both kinds were; for those shone by divine authority; but because the prophecies of Holy Scripture must be explained by the same Spirit by whom they were brought forth and inspired