# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1886_S28
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

28 Proceedings of the eleventh convention

us the retreat either; perhaps then, if we send a commission over and humbly ask permission.)

Grau: "Holy Scripture is no longer for us a great code of laws sent down from heaven, with its individual paragraphs, called proof-texts. Such a conception we must reject for the sake of faith as docetic and for the sake of scholarship as contrary to history." — At the temptation of Christ the devil became anxious and afraid when the LORD cited merely one proof-text of Holy Scripture; according to the newer theology that was unnecessary; Satan would only have had to say: A single proof-text proves nothing to me. Bring your proof from the whole of Scripture!

Grau: "Scripture is for us a collection of writings that has come into being through a truly human and historical development, which character does not contradict but alone corresponds to the Holy Spirit who rules in this development, as the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man and Son of God. The boundaries of the divine and the human in Scripture cannot at all be determined mechanically and quantitatively, any more than in the person of Jesus." (Entwickelungsgeschichte des Neutestamentlichen Schriftthums [History of the Development of the New Testament Literature]. Gütersloh 1871. I, 11, 12, 18 ff.)

Now read the story (John 7:44–53) of the servants sent out by the chief priests, who were to arrest Christ. When they come to Jesus, he is preaching. They take their stand and listen, thinking, when he has finished preaching we can still take him away. But behold, they are so gripped that they quietly slip away without Christ. The chief priests rebuke them: Why have you not brought the Christ? But they answer: "Never man spake like this man." That puts the chief priests in a rage. Angrily they call out to them: "Are ye also deceived? Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him? But this people who knoweth not the law are cursed." These scribes were genuine modern theologians of their time.

Kahnis: "The old-dogmatic inspiration rests on the basic thought that Scripture is God's Word because God the Holy Spirit is its actual author. But this he is in so far as he first gave the holy writers the impulse to write, and then dictated to them both content and words. . . . The untenability of the old-orthodox doctrine of inspiration will leap to the eye of anyone who takes the trouble to form a vivid picture of it in detail. Is one to imagine that the Apostle Paul, when he wrote that tender, urbane letter to Philemon, touched by a gentle humor, merely wrote down what the Holy Spirit dictated to him?" Here one sees how true God's Word speaks: "The natural man receiveth not