# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1886_S15
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1886. 15

it will abandon all the foundations of Christianity. The pious talk that God's Word is in the Bible deceives many. But such talk is nothing but a fraud. If there is but one error in the Bible that the Spirit of God has not himself designated as an error, then it is all over with the Bible. If someone recommended a book to me and said to me, in it there is truth and error, but you must find that out for yourself, I should have to believe that he only wanted to make a fool of me. And all the more if he says: God's Word is in it. What do I care for such a Bible, which brings truth and error mixed together! Such a Bible I would put in the stove. It would be a thoroughly dangerous book. I should always have to fear, if I said: this is false, that I would thereby be rejecting God's Word; or conversely, if I accepted something as divine truth and it were after all a human word, that I would be committing idolatry. Therefore this is nothing but a disguised, complete rejection of Holy Scripture, when one says: Scripture does contain God's Word, but it is not itself the Word of God; it contains the correct religious system, but alongside it also what is false; and it is the office of the theologians, as scholarly men, to examine what in it is divine and what human. We cannot and may not go along with that, or our congregations would have to, and would, renounce us as murderers of souls.

Oh, it is dreadful what is coming to light in our time! Matters have now gone so far that people venture to say it straight out: At bottom the Bible is not for the laity at all, it is not at all intended as a book of edification; the true religion was handed down orally in the Church; although the Bible is nonetheless an important book for theological scholarship, since in it one has in any case, among other things, a document from which one can learn the origin of the Church and its continuation in accordance with it. Until now the modern-believing professors had said only in their lecture halls to their students what they thought of the Bible; they feared the people, by whom they wished to be regarded as the leaders of the believers. But now at Dorpat it has been declared openly before a lay public that the Bible is really not for the people at all, but for the theologians, who alone are qualified to explore its divine content.

A particularly important point is also this, that the written Word is quite equal to the word spoken through the apostles and prophets, as has already been shown above. Yet the following passages may be noted for this. Abraham says to the rich man, Luke 16:29: "They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them." Now the prophets were no longer there at all, but long dead. From this we see that the Jews had the prophets also when they read their writings. Further it says in Mark 16:15: "Go ye into