# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1894_S52
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

52 Proceedings of the fifteenth convention

praised, as the way to the right work-righteousness that guarantees salvation, being transposed into virtue-enthusiasm after the pattern of Jesus, and v. Hofmann being transposed into the stream of the life of Jesus, that is, simply put: sanctification. Thus systematics here leads to the abolition of the Gospel.

Systematics has been, to no small degree, a fruitful mother that gives birth to doctrines. The chief demand of system-making is: there must be no gap anywhere in the doctrinal structure, and everything must agree with everything else in the most exact harmony. It must not be tolerated that reason, playing the schoolmaster, says: Something is missing here! or: Here one doctrine does not quite agree with another. In this way system-making has produced a number of doctrines. For example, the doctrine of the germ. System-making, which cannot tolerate a gap, thought it had found one between baptism and conversion, if a baptized person is to lose, through his falling away from faith, the whole life he once received in baptism. So system-making produced the doctrine of the germ already among the Calvinists. Namely this: that in the person who has fallen away after baptism and regeneration there nevertheless remains a germ of the life received in regeneration, and in conversion it is revived. The doctrine of the intermediate state, too, is a product of system-making, meant to fill the gap between time and eternity, to reconcile properly, at once, God's promise that all people shall be helped with God's government, in that he has nevertheless not let the helping Gospel come to so many. If eternity followed directly upon time, there would remain, in the opinion of the system-makers, a bad gap. This is filled, to general satisfaction, by inserting between time and eternity an intermediate state, which begins precisely with departure from temporal life. There, after death in the beyond, there is supposed to be preaching of the Gospel still, so that the one who has not been converted here can still be converted there. A lover of this doctrine of the intermediate state, a famous theologian, offers people a good comfort for the flesh with the explanation that God will surely not reject forever at once the person to whom the Gospel was perhaps preached only once here and who did not hear at once this one time, but according to his mercy he will have him preached to again in the beyond, in the intermediate state, where the sinner will have more earnestness and the preaching better success. One sees this in the rich man, Luke 16:24.

The doctrine of the intermediate corporeality is also a product of systematics and belongs here as well. First we are to have a natural body and then a glorified body, so Scripture says; this transformation would, according to systematics, be too much without a connecting link. So a hidden spiritual corporeality has to be inserted already here. That such a thing can take place we see in people whose legs have been amputated