# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S14
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

14 Proceedings of the nineteenth convention

[if one] assumes contradictions in Holy Scripture. For in all passages that seem to contradict one another, we can demonstrate that a reconciliation is possible. Apologetics, however, must be kept in the background by the Christian Church; as soon as it is put in the foreground, everything is turned around. For that reason the apologetics of the modern theologians is through and through false; these people want first to prove that the Christian doctrine is after all quite reasonable, and only afterward to come with the proclamation of this doctrine. That is to turn everything on its head. We step before the world with the preaching of the Gospel and of the Law that goes with it, and engage in apologetics only incidentally. We say now and then: You are fools, who start from the apparent contradictions in Scripture, for even according to sound reason one must say that a reconciliation is possible there. As the Christian Church we do not have to defend the Gospel but to preach it; we do not have to excuse Christianity before the world but to confess it. In this sense we say: The Church must keep apologetics in the background; in the foreground the testimony to the Gospel must remain. Yet apologetics is not useless. What else, in the end, was it but apologetics when the LORD did miracles? No one comes to faith through miracles; they happen for the sake of unbelievers. They had their value; according to a frequently used comparison they are to be regarded somewhat like bells; no one comes to faith through their sound either, yet the ringing of bells can help someone to come to faith through the preaching of the Gospel, namely if the sound of the bells prompts him to go to church. So too apologetic grounds can become an occasion for someone who previously kept away to go to church now, because a prejudice has been removed from him.

Holy Scripture Cannot Contradict Itself.

For a Christian it is certainly settled from the outset: Holy Scripture cannot contradict itself at all; for:

1. As the Word of God it is truthful. If Scripture is really God's Word, it must be truthful, for God is truthful. That all men are false and liars, Scripture and daily experience alike bear witness. That God is and must be truthful, Scripture and the natural revelation which even fallen man still has alike bear witness. One finds among the heathen, too, that they attribute to the deity the predicate of truthfulness. To think of God and in doing so to think of him as unreliable, mendacious, self-contradictory, is a contradiction in itself. Truthfulness is, as one calls it nowadays, a moral attribute, a property of the will. It is ascribed not merely in daily life but also in Scripture to men as well, namely to pious,