# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S69
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1884. 67

he leaves them without interpretation and follows the opinion of Scripture." (The holy Cyprian had erred in that he taught that all who had been baptized in a sect and later wished to be received into the orthodox church must be baptized once more. That was an obvious mistake. But Augustine says: This I do not accept; but I do not on that account make him a heretic, for he nevertheless stands on the right foundation of saving faith.) "And it is worth noting that before Augustine's times too much authority was ascribed by many to the fathers." (That is very important. Before Augustine people had already begun to cite the church fathers instead of Scripture. And indeed just that in which they had erred. And what a heap of errors Origen, for example, already had! But, says Augustine, away with it, even if a holy martyr has said it! — Oh, how much we therefore owe to this man! One sees from this that it is hypocrisy when one appeals to him in the papacy; just through him the papistic theory of tradition is refuted.) "But when the heretics wanted to support their errors without Scripture, solely from what the fathers had said inconveniently, they moved Augustine to repeat often in his writings that axiom (that is, an established proposition): that the articles of faith are to be proved solely from the canonical books, but the writings of others are to be read in such a way that it is permitted to disapprove and reject in them whatever does not agree with canonical truth." (Loc. theol. I. f. 5 sq.)

But let us hear Augustine himself. He had a good friend in Jerome. The latter was more learned than Augustine, who knew neither Hebrew nor Greek, but read Holy Scripture only in Latin translation; yet he could nevertheless not hold a candle to Augustine. Now Jerome was not a little taken with himself. When Augustine had once contradicted him, Jerome was put out by it and therefore wrote somewhat irritably to Augustine, who answered him thereupon, among other things, thus: "I have learned to render this honour and reverence to those books of Scripture alone which are now called canonical, that I believe most firmly that none of their authors erred in writing; but the others I read in such a way that, however great the holiness and learning in which they excel others, I do not hold something true because they have so believed, but because they were able to convince me, either through those canonical authors or through an acceptable reason, that it does not depart from the truth. And I hold that you also, my brother, think no otherwise; I am, I say, wholly of the opinion that you also do not want your books read as the books of the prophets and apostles are read, whose writings are free from all error, and to doubt which is already sacrilegious." (Epist. ad