# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S15
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1902. 15

[to] believing men. But with a difference. Whereas one can separate the concept of truthfulness from the concept of man, one cannot separate it from the concept of God; in God truthfulness is an unchangeable and unforfeitable attribute. The man who today has the praise of truthfulness can lie tomorrow; but God cannot lie. He is not merely truthful but the truth itself. Men are given the praise of truthfulness when what they say agrees with reality, when their word can be relied on, when they keep what they promise. A man a word, a word a man, as the proverb says. With God, too, it counts as proved that he is truthful when one points out that his word is truthful. For that reason one rightly cites, in the catechisms, as proof for the truthfulness of God himself, the Bible verse: "For the word of the LORD is right, and all his works are done in truth" [German: "The LORD's word is truthful, and what he promises, that he surely keeps"], Ps. 33:4. If I have forgotten when the Thirty Years' War was, and tell the teacher in answer to his question: 1648 to 1678, then he exclaims: "Wrong!" By that he does not mean to say that I have a false heart. He could say that only if he were quite certain that I knew better even at that moment, but he means to say that my mouth has spoken falsely, untruly, incorrectly. In God the possibility that he should speak what is untrue, incorrect, false is excluded already because he is omniscient. He does not forget; he does not speak of things of which he has only unclear, inexact, confused knowledge. In him there is not only the absolute knowledge of the truth but also the absolute will to say it and only it. That is, as has been said, inseparable from the concept of God; therefore he is called not merely truthful but the truth itself. If Paul already said of himself, "With me it is Yea Yea, and Nay Nay," 2 Cor. 1:17, and with this means to give emphasis to the truthfulness and sincerity of his dispositions toward the Corinthians, then much less can the Yea in God be at the same time a Nay and the Nay at the same time a Yea. In other words: God cannot contradict himself in his Word. Whoever therefore still calls Holy Scripture God's Word and really holds it to be so must at the same time confess: It is impossible that it should contradict itself, because it is impossible that God should contradict himself. Indeed, one must identify God's Word with the truth itself, as the LORD Christ does when he says: "Sanctify them through thy truth; thy word is" (not merely truthful, but) "the truth." That is the first argument.

2. Holy Scripture is inspired. When a king wishes to make his will known to one of his subjects, he does so as a rule not in person but through an intermediary, say through his secretary. Now it is quite possible that the secretary has not rightly grasped the sense and the meaning of the king. If that is the case, then even with the best will of the secretary the subject can obtain no exact and