# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S16
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

16 Proceedings of the nineteenth convention

[exact and] reliable knowledge of the king's actual will. The case is also conceivable that the secretary has indeed understood the king's meaning well but is unfaithful to his master and falsifies his word; in this case too the subject does not learn what the king's will is. Now God, to be sure, spoke to men without intermediaries in Paradise and also afterward more than once. But the Holy Scripture, which contains his Word and his will for the children of men, he has delivered to men through intermediaries, namely through the prophets and apostles. These were men, by nature just as fallible as any one of us, and by nature just as open to falsehood and hypocrisy as any one of us. That this is so, there can be not the slightest doubt. The first the evangelists themselves attest to us in various ways. When they tell us, for instance, how Jesus said: "The Son of man shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on; and they shall scourge him, and put him to death: and the third day he shall rise again," they add at the same time: "And they" (they might also have spoken in the first person plural) "understood none of these things: and this saying was hid from them, neither knew they the things which were spoken," although the words of Jesus had surely left nothing in the least to be desired in plainness. The second is attested to us by that incident in Antioch of which Paul speaks in Gal. 2, where he tells us how he had to reproach Peter and Barnabas and the other Jews with them that they had not walked rightly according to the truth of the Gospel, but had let hypocrisy slip into their conduct.

If that is so, how does it come about that we nevertheless dare to put forward, of the Scripture composed by such men, the assertion: It does not contradict itself and cannot contradict itself!? We should in fact not do this, not dare to do it, if God had not done something quite special with these men in the Old and New Testaments, which assures us absolutely that in those writings we have before us the Word of God free of contradiction. But God has indeed, as we know and believe, done something quite special of this kind with them, and that is inspiration. He drove them by his Holy Spirit to write; he preserved them in writing, as in their public teaching and preaching, from all error and led them into all truth, so that for this very reason it is also impossible for the holy writings to contradict one another. Since we have the Scripture of the Old and New Testaments before us, we can be as certain that we have before us God's and only God's Word and will, as he can be certain of having his king's unfalsified expression of will before him who has before him either a handwritten letter of the king himself or a document which the king dictated to his secretary and then signed with his own hand.