# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1886_S30
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

30 Proceedings of the eleventh convention

Apostles tell the truth? 2. Did they want to tell the truth? 3. Did they also have to tell the truth?

Kahnis now writes further: "If Solomon's Proverbs, as even the stricter party admits, do not rest on revelation but on practical wisdom: what a contradiction lies in the assumption that the Holy Spirit dictated human practical wisdom! Do these rules, to be taken very much *cum grano salis*, not then become laws of the Holy Spirit? And this doctrine of inspiration transferred to a book like Koheleth: what monstrosities arise for us! . . . Among these prophetic and apostolic writings, however, there are differences, as much from the point of view of origin as of content. We cannot place Deuteronomy on a level with the first four books. Among the prophets Obadiah and Jonah stand below Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. In the New Testament the Pastoral Epistles (p. 531) and the Epistle to Philemon move into a second line." (What angel from the abyss taught him to make gradations among the holy writers?) "The word of revelation which goes forth within the realm of the Old and New Covenant is to be understood only in the context of its history. And so the historical books of the Old and New Covenant enter into their canonical right, but a right of the second degree. As the content of these is the cooperation of the divine and the human in the kingdom of God, so also the holy historians are not necessarily men of revelation but men who stand in the spirit of the kingdom of God. To this belong in the Old Testament the prophetic historical books in the first, the hagiographical - Ruth, Ezra, Nehemiah in the second, the books of Esther and Chronicles in the third rank. (p. 285 ff.) In the New Testament there fall into this second series, in the first rank, the first three Gospels (p. 406 ff.), in the second the Acts of the Apostles (p. 518). A third class is formed by the Old and New Testament hagiographers, whose content is neither revelation nor history of the kingdom of God, but the life in the kingdom of God, as it presents itself in particulars. To this belong in the Old Testament in the first rank the Psalms (p. 294 ff.), in the second rank the Proverbs of Solomon (p. 304), Job (p. 305) and Lamentations of Jeremiah, in the third the Song of Songs (p. 303), Koheleth (p. 309) and Daniel (p. 369 ff.); in the New Testament in the first rank the Epistle to the Hebrews and the 2nd and 3rd Epistles of John, which despite all probability are nevertheless not certainly of Johannine origin and moreover of a more personal content (p. 546), in the second the remaining catholic epistles and the Apocalypse (p. 537 ff.). Where in the first class the personality is of essential significance, it recedes in the second class, since here everything depends on the objective truth and the spirit of the presentation. But it lies in the nature of the third class that the subject comes to significance. It is not a matter of indifference whether a Psalm