# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1886_S64
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

64 Proceedings of the eleventh convention

between doctrine and life in his apostles. Not from the life of the
apostles are we to draw, but from their doctrine. They were not in
all their doing driven by the Holy Spirit, but when they
spoke, then they were driven by the Holy Spirit. This objection
therefore confuses things which Christ deliberately keeps apart. And then
consider how Paul, who ascribes to himself that the Holy Spirit speaks through
him, and who allows no one to change anything in his words, on the other hand
judges of his life, Rom. 7. The apostles were, after all, also poor
sinners; but that does not make their doctrine, their word, their writings, which the Holy
Spirit composed through them, human or imperfect.

A fourth objection is that if Scripture was dictated word for
word by the Holy Spirit, everything would
have to bear the same stamp in its diction, in the manner and way
of expression; yet there prevails a great diversity; Matthew writes quite
differently from Paul, and he again quite differently from John, and so on; the
kind of argumentation too is peculiar to the individual writers;
certain expressions of one are not found at all
in another. To this the answer is: It is not because the instrument is human
that what was done through the instrument is human also. If God had wanted one uniform
form in Scripture, he could have had everything written either through Paul or through John or through
some other apostle. But God did not want that.
He did not suspend the personality during the writing, so that
Paul would have ceased to be Paul. Precisely because God wanted to write through this one so and
through that one differently, therefore he wrote through these men.

When the dogmaticians speak of the various style of Scripture,
they compare it, as already mentioned above, with an organ. In it
the pipes also are constructed quite differently. One pipe is pitched low,
another high, one has a sharp tone, another a
dull one. But it is always one and the same wind that blows through all of them
and, according to their nature, brings them to sound. That is a precious
simile. The newer men make fun of it, to be sure, but we
do not envy them this pleasure. For we know too
that one is not to imagine the apostles as if they had stood there like dead organ
pipes. In every simile one may allow only the points of
comparison to hold, and not go beyond them. And
in this picture the point of comparison is that the one heavenly
wind, the Holy Spirit, governs all the holy writers alike and yet has adapted himself
to the nature of each individual. And that is by no means unworthy of him.
If a quite uneducated man goes to a scholar and asks him to write a letter for him,
since he cannot write, and the scholar is willing to do so and in doing so makes use