# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S64
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

62 Proceedings of the tenth convention

doubt, even if a thousand old or recent teachers of the church taught otherwise.

Moreover we do not say of our opponents that they proceed in a papistic way in all doctrines; but in this point, that they want to set up the doctrine of election [*Wahllehre*] after the dogmaticians without, indeed against, the clear Scripture, they act in a papistic way. They mock us, to be sure, because with our attitude toward the dogmaticians we nevertheless recommend their books. For we do indeed recommend to our hearers, now as before, for example the Weimar Bible work as a golden book, as a German Bible work such as there is no better. But we say here too: Test it. For there are also in it, as in all human writings, some *naevi*, some blemishes.

The Council of Trent has further determined that no one can interpret the Bible rightly except the Church, by which they mean the fathers and councils, indeed at bottom only the Pope. One sees clearly there that the Pope is the Antichrist. He fears nothing more than the written Word of God. For this refutes all his errors. Since he cannot, so as not to betray himself, simply reject and curse the written Word, he helps himself by saying that only he can interpret it. First, then, he makes man's word into God's Word, and then he devises a way to do away with the true Word of God. So it says in the

decrees of the Council of Trent: "Furthermore it decrees, in order to restrain wilful spirits, that no one, relying on his own judgment, in matters of faith and morals which belong to the building up of Christian doctrine, shall presume to interpret the Holy Scripture by distorting it according to his own sense, contrary to that sense which holy mother Church has held and holds, to whom it belongs to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, or also contrary to the unanimous consent of the fathers." (Loc. cit., p. 15.)

May our opponents note from this where they are heading when they also set up as a necessary mark of the agreement of a doctrine with Scripture that the interpretation of the Scripture passages concerned must coincide with the interpretation of the teachers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while they show a real horror of the interpretation of a Luther, Urbanus Rhegius, Brenz, Kirchner and other theologians of the sixteenth century. Everything depends for them on one's agreeing with the teachers after the Formula of Concord. We too follow these dear men in almost all doctrines, but not in the few in which they depart from God's Word, namely above all not in the doctrine of election [*Gnadenwahl*], of the Sabbath, and of the power of the secular authorities in church matters. Therefore they ought rather