# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S18
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

18 Proceedings of the tenth convention

but if any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire." The apostle is therefore not speaking here of heretics, for these forsake the foundation. He speaks of those who are saved, whose wood, hay and stubble of erroneous opinions burn up, but their precious stones of pure doctrine remain. When therefore our opponents now cry out that we make the Church Fathers into heretics, one can confidently say to them: you are liars! If we did not formerly speak so plainly of the faults of the teachers of the Church as now, let it be considered that we first had to bring their writings into our poor Lutheran people in America. How we were decried! Soon it was: you are Catholic! because of our doctrine of absolution —; you are Unionists! because of the doctrine of the spiritual priesthood —; you are enthusiasts! because of the doctrine of repentance, conversion, regeneration. How were we now to prove that we are Lutherans? With the Bible? Yes, our doctrine stands well enough in the Bible, but it does not stand beside it: this is Lutheran. So we had to bring forward the symbolical books, Luther, Chemnitz, Gerhard, etc. In this way, by God's grace, a truly Lutheran Church has arisen here, for which we cannot thank God enough in eternity. To these dear Fathers we owe it, next to God, that thousands and thousands have come over to us, preachers, laymen and whole synods.

Dannhauer writes among other things: "A fundamental article of faith is that which either necessarily leads to faith or necessarily flows from it." (The ancients distinguished, that is, unrestricted articles of faith, i.e., those without which no one can come to faith, — and articles of faith in the restricted sense, i.e., those which one can know or not know and yet stand in the faith. The latter flow only from the others.) . . . "The latter articles can indeed without harm to salvation be unknown and denied, either before their revelation (for without harm to salvation Eve did not know that the Messiah would be the child of a virgin, for the revelation that a virgin would be the mother, which is found in Isa. 7, had not yet taken place; further, Nathanael has the praise of a true Israelite, although he denied that the Messiah came from Nazareth), or before clear and sufficient explanation. Hence the fundamental errors in the Fathers, who were involved in controversies not yet sufficiently set out, when the ice was not yet broken, are called blemishes (naevi), not heresies. But after revelation and explanation have taken place, they can without harm to salvation be neither unknown nor denied." (Christeis. Protheoria. p. 45.)

A great difference there is, therefore, in saying: This book contains heresy, or: it contains blemishes. It can be that in one period a doctrine