# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S17
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1902. 17

It is by no means my intention and task to present here the whole doctrine of inspiration; that Holy Scripture is inspired belongs rather to the presupposition, to the substructure of my work. But a few points belonging to this doctrine I will touch on, because attention to them is of the greatest importance for our subsequent occupation. When the holy writers call themselves "the pen of a ready writer" (namely of the Holy Spirit), none of us understands that so mechanically as is sometimes imputed to us Lutherans, as if the holy writers had been not living but dead instruments of the Holy Spirit. A mere pen, to be sure, knows nothing and feels nothing; it must simply let itself be used and is nothing but a dead tool. Of the holy writers, however, we teach that they were living instruments of the Holy Spirit; but we distinguish what they were in themselves, as believers too, from the working of the Holy Spirit which we call inspiration.

When the apostle Paul receives news: This and that is the state of things in Corinth, this in Galatia; when the evangelist Luke learns that Theophilus is in danger of being misled by all sorts of false accounts of the life of Jesus and perhaps of accepting all sorts of things as true that are not true and not attested: then they do not remain without feeling and also not without human resolves. Then Paul's heart burns within him; then Luke wants to inquire everything exactly from eyewitnesses and ear-witnesses of the gospel history, and does so. And then the Holy Spirit steps in and drives the one as well as the other to write, and to write just as he writes. The holy men of God have spoken — orally and in writing — moved by the Holy Spirit.

Further we say that the Holy Spirit also gave the holy writers what they were to write, the material, that is. This too is not to be understood as if, without inspiration and immediately before the inspiration, they had known absolutely nothing of what they were to write. Moses had for the most part lived through what is written in the second to the fifth book of Moses, and certainly, before he wrote a letter, he also knew the main events whose description fills his first book. Matthew and John were disciples of Jesus, called by him, went out and in with him, lived through what they wrote only years afterward, knew much more than what they wrote, more discourses and more miracles of Jesus, which they could have described to us. With Mark and Luke too, who did not belong to the Twelve, one can always think of a human, apostolic source from which they could have had their reports. But something other is this their human knowing, experiencing and inquiring, something other also