# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1886_S23
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1886. 23

Scripture word, or a theory of revelation according to which a thoroughgoing correctness*) is to be ascribed to all the words of the Apostles, cannot be maintained in view of the results obtained here." (Das Alte Testament im Neuen Testament [The Old Testament in the New Testament], 6th ed., p. 48.)

Dieckhoff: "It will probably have to be conceded that the way in which the inerrancy of the word of Holy Scripture was conceived in the old orthodox dogmatics is untenable, and that one cannot get the better of negative criticism if one thinks one must hold back with that concession." (Kirchliche Zeitschrift [Church Journal], 1858, p. 757.)

Here again it comes to light what drives and urges these theologians into their unhealthy attitude toward Holy Scripture. It is the wretched fear of so-called scholarship, which one would like to master scholarly, and in this interest one makes "concessions" upon concessions, to which one has no right before God. What is achieved and not achieved by this has already been stated above.

That one only gets into new difficulties with those distinctions and concessions, out of which so-called scholarship too has found no way, modern theology itself is a proof. Thus, as soon as one has distinguished between the divine and the human side of Holy Scripture, the question arises what is now to be counted to the divine and what to the human side of Scripture. And what do we hear now as the answer to this question? If one of these theologians himself is to tell us, we learn from Kübel loc. cit. p. 107 f.: "Now it must indeed be conceded: not merely does there prevail, as the examples cited show, no thoroughgoing unity of view among the Positives, but chiefly: not a single one of them, not even Beck excepted, can determine a firm, certain and clear boundary between that which in the Bible can be afflicted with 'mistakes' and that which cannot."**)

To be sure, we do find attempts to give the necessary guidance toward such a division between the divine and the supposedly human in Scripture. Thus Volck writes: "In order to be able to carry out the separation of the domain of the infallible from that where error is possible, and further — the division of the essential from the inessential in the Bible, the interpreter must judge everything individual in its content by its relation to the salvation that is realized in the history reported by it. He must see whether and in what connection it stands with the same." (Lehre und Wehre [Doctrine and Defense] 32, p. 1.)

*) Underlined by Tholuck.
**) Underlined by Kübel himself.