# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1894_S53
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1894. 53

and who nevertheless often feel pain where they no longer have legs. And what is the finest part of it, this hidden spiritual corporeality is supposed to be nourished by the partaking of the body and blood of Christ in the Sacrament, and so a systematic bridge has been found from the natural body to the glorified body of the resurrection. But, says St. Paul, our knowledge is in part, and our prophesying is in part, and he thereby forbids all systematizing that will tolerate no leap, no break, or even supposes that it must fill the gaps which divine wisdom has left for the exercise of our humility, with its own false wisdom.

b. Fanaticism with attenuated systematizing. Fanaticism of this kind does not precisely have the ambition to construct a system of the perfected kind. Although a representative of it has declared in a public assembly that the harmonizing of doctrine is the task of our theology too. This kind has the peculiarity that it seeks to make up for its fanatical spirituality by drawing inferences.

Theologically inadmissible, however, are all inferences that offend against the following principles: 1. that Scripture is the source of all doctrine; 2. that Scripture is the judge of all doctrine; 3. that Scripture can be both, in that it is clear and interprets itself, and ought to be both only in this way; 4. that Scripture is source and norm of all doctrine in such a way that the doctrines of faith are to be taken solely from its definite *sedes doctrinae* (seats of doctrine), and that only so may the principle that Scripture interprets itself find application.

Therefore an inference that actually produces a doctrinal item or member of doctrine is an illicit (illegitimate) one. No items of pure doctrine have arisen in this manner. On the other hand, many illicit inferences have indeed been made and doctrines thereby produced, for example in this way, that from passages of Scripture that deny something one took the opposite to be now affirmed by Scripture and thereby established as scriptural doctrine.

An inference is illicit if it wants to decide about the correct or false shape of a doctrine, because Scripture itself alone holds the office of judge.

An inference is illegitimate if, for the definition of a doctrine, it wants to bring in certain members from the definitions of other doctrines. And if in such a case the member of the definition thus brought in could, in its kind and in its importance, also otherwise be supported by hundreds of passages, one may not justify oneself by saying that one is indeed interpreting Scripture by Scripture; for by interpreting Scripture by Scripture one understands above all this, that Scripture, in all its statements on the individual articles of faith, expresses itself in such a way that the individual passages teaching on one and the same article interpret one another, and no interpretation of this article of faith counts as corresponding to divine truth that has not been obtained in this way.