# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S38
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

36 Proceedings of the tenth convention

according to reason, but according to clearer passages of Scripture. For only the eternal light can make the eternal light visible to us. But then, secondly, they must also be such passages of Scripture as treat of the same matter. The tactic of our opponents, however, is this: if they have a dark (or even a clear) passage on election before them, they bring in such passages as treat of an entirely different matter, e.g.: Whoever believes will be saved. But nothing is thereby proved for election by saying: We are saved through faith. That is, after all, an entirely different doctrine, namely the doctrine of justification. If our opponents want to prove their doctrine, they must rather show us a passage that says: faith is the cause of our election. — It is, to be sure, contrary to the whole Scripture that God, as if reaching into a lucky-bag, should have said: This man I will save and the other not. For clear as the sun the whole Scripture testifies that God wills to save all, all sinners. And yet both remain true: God found in man no cause to elect him to salvation, and: whoever is elected has it from God's free mercy. Why? — Because Scripture teaches both most clearly and plainly. How that now fits together we do not know and are not to and will not know. And this is precisely the horror of Calvinism, that it will not let this mystery stand, but resolves it by a blasphemous denial of universal grace, and also the horror of Synergism, that it wants to resolve that mystery by shamefully denying salvation by grace alone and asserting that the ground of a man's election lies in his better conduct and in his own decision.

How the Church Fathers are to be regarded in relation to the Word of God is shown also already by Hieron. Kromayer: "The Fathers were lights, not gods.*) . . We are built only on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ being the cornerstone, Eph. 2:20. The Fathers, however, do not have the privilege of infallibility, and they did not write their things with the necessity that one believe them, but with the freedom that one judge them. Yes, they also wrote retractations themselves. — We add here in passing that the collections of the Fathers' books are to be read through with two kinds of eyes: 1. with the eye of prudence and 2. with the eye of love. With the eye of prudence, that one not confuse the genuine writings with the spurious or mutilated; the later ones, which have taken on more impurity, with the earlier; and so the golden age with the leaden, the textbooks with the polemical writings and books of sermons. With the (eye) of love, however

*) Patres fuerunt lumina, non numina. [The Fathers were lights, not gods.]