# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1892_S12
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

12 Proceedings of the fourteenth convention

everything is also poisoned and defiled by original sin, so that it is good for nothing before God."

All human beings, then, are afflicted with original sin, which is truly sin and involves inexpressible corruption of the whole human nature, and so also those human beings who are lost. This, however, was the first assertion of the thesis before us. The second is that on account of original sin they too have already fallen under damnation. Of this we now have to treat.

II.

The truth of the latter assertion follows from the truth of the former. For if the lost, like all human beings, are afflicted with original sin, and if this is truly sin, then they too, like all human beings, must have fallen under damnation, and not merely because of the actual sins, committed with freedom and consciousness, that spring from original sin, but already because of their corruption by original sin, because they are born of the flesh as flesh. Scripture testifies: "God is holy" — "You are not a God who has pleasure in wickedness; the evil shall not dwell with you." — "The wages of sin is death." To the first human being God threatened, in case of transgression, death, banishment from his face, damnation, and death also came upon them when they transgressed his commandment. Repeatedly God afterward threatened the curse upon those who would not keep his law. How could God take pleasure in human beings who are now flesh, who are born as sinful human beings; how could he remain in fellowship with them? According to his holiness and his threat, his wrath must rest upon them, they must lie under his curse, they must have fallen under temporal and eternal death, under damnation. Scripture testifies this expressly too. Thus Eph. 2:3 says: "We were by nature children of wrath." I permit myself to bring in the proof from this passage from Philippi, who writes in his *Glaubenslehre* [doctrine of faith] III, 203: "This selfish-sensual corruption of human nature, which propagates itself with this nature itself by way of generation, further establishes, according to the teaching of the New Testament, a relation of guilt before the divine forum in and of itself. If it is certain that Holy Scripture knows no sin without guilt [*reatus*], as indeed the apostle John, 1 John 3:4, designates sin as ἀνομία, that is, as lawlessness and accordingly as imputable guilt, and the apostle Paul, Rom. 7:7, designates even ἐπιθυμία [desire, covetousness] as sin forbidden and exposed by the law: then it follows of itself that the innate evil desire and inclination too is in itself a culpable and punishable offense, which is sin in every form and shape, thus not only in the developed form of the conscious deed, but