# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1892_S24
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

24 Proceedings of the fourteenth convention

who are stuck in unbelief and are heading for damnation want to make God responsible for their damnation; but God rejects that and says that their own resistance to him is to blame for their ruin. Cf. Acts 13:46; 7:51.

The manner of fighting of our opponents is a dreadful one. In mocking our position as senseless, they actually deride the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Not we, but God himself first taught what seems so ridiculous to them. In other points of doctrine they take the same position as we. They accept many mysteries of God as truth, although they can neither comprehend nor reconcile them; they accept them merely because they are divine doctrine. They believe, for example, that God is present in every place of his dominion in his whole fullness and majesty and that he is nonetheless one indivisible being, who fills heaven and earth, without their being able to comprehend it in the least. They place themselves just like all sectarians, who all still retain some points of the faith but in the articles in which they hold a preconceived opinion want to be masters over Scripture. Therefore we want above all to stress first that every mockery of our doctrine of the *Gnadenwahl* [election of grace], grounded in Scripture, is directed against the Holy Spirit; afterwards one can, if one wishes and as far as it goes, show that our doctrine is not so unreasonable either as those pretend.

With such rational arguments we can of course prove nothing, but we step onto the opponents' ground in order to argue from their standpoint. The success of such apologetics must always be very slight, and one must take great care not to get onto false tracks. Human reason can find nothing in spiritual matters. What we know of divine things we have learned from Scripture. In it are found all the articles of faith, and each one of them we must take from Scripture alone. When we have learned one part of the doctrine of faith, we cannot find the other ourselves by inference; even the most learned cannot do this. If one knows, for example, how it stands with the faith of those who are saved, one still does not know how it stands with the unbelief of those who are lost. The one as well as the other we learn only from divine revelation. Let us therefore keep to the Word and doctrine of God and bow our reason under the obedience of faith.

God is not to blame that those who are lost do not come to faith, neither through a decree aimed directly at it nor indirectly through an omission on God's part, as if he had not also in those who are lost earnestly willed to work faith. He wills rather that all come to faith and to salvation. Even the election, which extends to a limited number, does not remove the universal