# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1894_S21
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1894. 21

Defense and Answer against the spiritless soft-living flesh at Wittenberg, which with a declared Weyße [sic], through the theft [Diepſtal, sic] of Holy Scripture has so miserably defiled wretched Christendom." —

The Lord, like the apostles, took from their own time also glimpses into the future, nearer, farther and most distant times, up to the end of the days.

The word already cited, 2 Peter 2:1, points to the time next after the days of the apostles: "Among you there will be false prophets." His readers, St. Peter means, will still live to see it. As enthusiasts we have already come to know them from Peter's description, that they deal with people with feigned words. The words in the farewell address of St. Paul to the elders of the congregation at Ephesus, Acts 20:29, 30, point to the same time, close to the work of the apostles: "Among you wolves will come." And if one now considers verses 24, 25 and 27, where St. Paul so emphatically stresses that he had brought them the kingdom of God truly and in fact and had preached the Gospel in its completeness, by which he surely includes at least 1 Cor. 15:1–4, then Paul gives clearly to understand that by the wolves coming among them the enthusiasts are chiefly meant, namely those enthusiasts who would by no means hold the Word proclaimed so far to be complete and sufficient; indeed, who would by no means let even the kingdom of God of the Pauline kind count as the one in its most perfect spiritual form. This they will want to bring you with new revelations.

To a somewhat more distant, though still not too remote time the Apostle points in 2 Thess. 2:1 ff., in the mighty prophecy of the Antichrist, of the papacy. Its development was seen, to be sure, only by times considerably far removed from the apostolic age, and that it would be so, St. Paul says in verses 7 and 8. But equally he says with verse 7 that the beginnings of the papacy, with its first secret stirrings, with the first still little recognized starts of its abominable doctrines, reach into his own time. "The mystery of lawlessness is already at work," he says, verse 7 [lit. "It already stirs secretly, the wickedness"]. Here one is to think of the manifold starts of the false doctrines of tradition, of righteousness by works, of the working of the Holy Spirit detached from Scripture. These are the starts of the papacy. Thus our Confession also describes the matter in the Smalcald Articles, Part 3, Article 8: "For the papacy too is sheer enthusiasm, in which the pope boasts that all rights are in the shrine of his heart, and whatever he decides and commands with his church shall be spirit and right, even if it is above and against Scripture or the spoken word." — Further, this look into the future was added, that the enthusiasts will call out to the Christians