# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1886_S53
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1886. 53

is joined to the body and acts upon it? And yet it happens.
Many, because they could not explain this to themselves, have become materialists
and now assert that there is no spirit at all, only matter. That
is also the end among theologians, if they proceed consistently; they
must then deny altogether the working of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles. *)

Thesis III.

B. Scripture teaches that everything that is written in it,
not only as to content but also as to expression,
is a work of the Holy Spirit.

Two things are asserted here:

1. According to the teaching of Holy Scripture, everything that is
written in it is a work of the Holy Spirit. What
holds of one part of Scripture, namely that it is God's Word,
holds also of the whole of Scripture. When Christ and his apostles
appeal to Scripture or point to it, they do so in such
a way that they make no distinction among the individual books;
they except no part of Scripture. John 5:39 Christ says:
"Search the Scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life;
and they are they which testify of me." Here the word Scripture stands,
as always elsewhere, for the divinely inspired Holy Scripture. If
anything in this Scripture were to be excepted, if anything in it
were of human kind and not divinely reliable, it would be a
dreadful direction to point a man to the whole book, where
eternal life is at stake. When someone bases his researches in worldly
sciences on human books, he builds the result of his researches on these
books. If now errors lurk in a human book, unknown to him, his researches
too will turn out faulty, and precisely by his using the book
conscientiously. So in the last century, in solving a
mathematical problem, a famous scholar arrived at a result which
for a long time was generally held to be correct. In time, however, it was
discovered that that calculation was false, and that on the contrary the problem had been correctly solved in the
cell of the honeybee. And the cause of the deviation lay
in an error in the logarithm tables on which that calculation had been
based and which the learned mathematician had used exactly at the faulty
place. So it is also with regard to Holy Scripture.
If everything in it were not rock-solid, perfectly reliably certain, we should have to

*) So far the minutes by Pastor Burmester.