# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S65
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1884. 63

to say to us: For the fathers' sake we will not burden your conscience, but so it stands in God's Word. Then we could investigate whose doctrine is grounded in Scripture and whose is not. Or is it perhaps already a bad sign when someone says: Here I do not go with Gerhard and others; I do so only when he proves his doctrine to me from God's Word? For only then does the word of God hold: "Obey your teachers and follow them," namely when they bring us the gospel. Only open papists with a Lutheran name can declare this a bad sign. — To be sure, we gladly grant that our opponents have never put forward in bare words the theory that matters of faith are to be grounded on the writings of the fathers and consciences bound to their doctrinal decisions. They have done that as little as the Calvinists have laid down the principle that Holy Scripture is to be interpreted according to reason. But as the latter have quite openly practised this principle and still practise it, so that it has been imputed to them by our theologians with full right, so our opponents too have practised that theory now and then and practise it likewise still today, so that this theory too is imputed to them by us with full right. We know quite well that the leaders among our opponents held the fathers up against us and publicly and solemnly pledged their poor people, led astray by them, to the writings of the fathers mainly because they knew no other way to cast suspicion on us before their people as open false teachers. But all the more dreadful is it that they practise a theory of which on every other occasion they themselves will hear nothing. In doing so they not only sacrifice the truth to a wretched church politics, but also impress upon their own people in practice a papistic principle, which they will never talk them out of again, and which will rather eat about itself among them like a cancer and develop in all directions. God's Word is simply not to be trifled with.

Most remarkable — let this be noted here only in passing — is the old tradition from the third century that Peter had a motto, that is, a favourite saying. Clement of Alexandria, who died after 212, tells this. He reports, namely, that Peter always had on his lips the words: Οὐδὲν ἄτερ γραφῶν, that is, Nothing without Scripture. See: Stromata, book VI, fol. 678.

Here we can say to the Pope: That is a good tradition, we accept it, but it also overturns all your traditions. Yes, we grant: There may be much preserved in a book that the apostles really spoke but that is not in the Bible. If it now agrees with Scripture, we accept it, but we can and will prove nothing by it. Since the Holy Spirit has not included such sayings in Scripture, we are sure that the Holy