# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1886_S38
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

38 Proceedings of the eleventh convention

you give. That should rather make you hesitate at once and drive you to the sigh: God preserve me from condemning his Word according to my reason. But how many do rather as Eve did in Paradise! When the devil said to her: "Ye shall not surely die," etc., she looked at the tree, how lovely it was, until evil desire was kindled like an unquenchable fire in her heart. And then she took and ate of the forbidden fruit. So Christians do here too, when they let themselves be led into a false school and not into Luther's. Then it is said: One cannot hold it so much against the Bible that it makes the sun go; it speaks there in simplicity, as people then imagined the matter. — To fool our children with such a thing ought not to be permitted to any schoolteacher. For the Holy Spirit is surely wiser than Copernicus. One cannot indeed demand that everyone interpret the Bible passage in question exactly as we interpret it. But if someone cannot convince himself that the passage is to be so interpreted, he should hold his tongue before his pupils, keep the matter to himself, and not poison the children by his views.

But there is this also to be taken into account in the modern doctrine of inspiration: If we or others say that with the denial of the divinity of Holy Scripture the foundation of the Christian faith is given up, the newer theologians answer: If that were true, the very first Christians would have had no foundation of faith at all. For how long it took, they say, until the canon was fixed and until the whole of Christendom had it in its possession! how long they contended about what belonged to the canon or not! only gradually did people agree which writings were to be regarded as canonical. The first of whom it is known to us at all that he was in possession of a New Testament canon, namely Marcion, was not even a Christian but a heretic. But what a disgrace such assertions are! In Marcion, who was born in the days of the Apostle John, we find already a canon. The Christians who take him on account of his false doctrine reproach him with mutilating the canon. So it must already have existed complete. Indeed, Marcion is even reproached with having altered the order of the New Testament books. So far, then, one was at that time already, that one had a quite definite order of the biblical books of the New Testament. So already in the light of secular world history it does not hold water that Christians for centuries had no Bible. True, the pope tried to rob Christians of the Bible, but how did he succeed? To this very day Holy Scripture has been the foundation of faith in Christendom. In millions of copies it is spread throughout the whole world and will remain until the end of days. And we pray God: