# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S12
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

12 Proceedings of the nineteenth convention

[Wenn heutzutage] a man makes the attempt to prove that Scripture contradicts itself, and sets passages from it over against one another, what a pitiful impression the mere list often makes! It often contains nothing but side issues, trifles, which would strike not even five out of a hundred Bible readers. From the very selection one often notices that the man lacks all spiritual understanding, so that one is reminded of Bomhard's saying: "They are people to whom the bitter herbs in which the Passover lamb was served matter ten times more than the Lamb of God himself, who bears the sin of the world." Here in Althamer, by contrast, they are questions that concern the main points of Christian faith and life; they touch things that concern Christ, the ground of our salvation, and must move every Bible reader in his heart.

I have given somewhat fuller notice of this book because I wished to attach to it the wish that someone might prepare from it an abridgment which could still render quite good service to Bible readers. The book found a quite joyful reception and the highest praise among the Lutherans at that time; to the papists, however, it was a thorn in the eye and an abomination. The pope put it on the index of forbidden books.

But Althamer did not remain the only one who labored in such a work. Quite a number of similar books came out in the Lutheran Church, and the Reformed Church too was not idle in this. It is quite impossible for me to list all these writings and even to discuss their contents cursorily. Nor do I know them all myself from my own use. A few works, however, I will still name.

First, Michael Walther's "Harmonia Biblica", unquestionably the most extensive work of this kind, which appeared in Nuremberg in 1654. It has over 1400 pages in quarto and treats all the passages of the Bible, from the first book of Moses to the Revelation of St. John, that had been set in contradiction to one another up to that time. In the Gospel of Matthew, for example, there are, in the first chapter alone, no fewer than 17 verses in which people have wished to find contradictions with other passages. He sends ahead, on about 50 pages, a treatise on the art of reconciling in the right way passages that appear contradictory. In this he treats an important part of hermeneutics. The author is an orthodox Lutheran. — In the following century it is Lilienthal who defends "the good cause of divine revelation" against the English Deists in 16 octavo volumes, and also devotes a volume and a half to the refutation of the charge that Scripture contradicts itself.

To be sure, the attacks on Holy Scripture have not ceased on that account, and the charge that it contradicts itself has been raised again and again. At the end of the 18th and in the first half of the 19th century it became especially loud. Who has not already heard the name of David Friedrich Strauß, and also that of the much more superficial