# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S22
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

22 Proceedings of the nineteenth convention

[make] anyone a Christian through apologetics, even if through it we silence the foolish objections of reason, or rather of unreason.

How foolish, for example, is the objection against inspiration which is taken from the diversity of style among the holy writers! This objection recurs pretty much in all modern dogmaticians. They reason thus: If Scripture were inspired by God, then there could be only one style in Scripture. But what style should the Holy Spirit have used? If he wished to speak in his own style, he would have had to use the heavenly style, and that we do not understand. The apostle Paul was once caught up as far as the third heaven and heard unspeakable words, which no man can utter. If, then, the Holy Spirit wished to speak to us men, he had to leave his style in heaven, or he could not enter into communication with us. What human style should he now choose? There is no style in the abstract [in abstracto]. Style is always something concrete, is always found in the individual persons who use it. So the Holy Spirit, since he wished to use a human style, had to use the style of the individual men through whom he wished to speak; thus, when he spoke through Moses he used Moses' style, when through John, John's style, etc.

Whence does it come, however, that it sometimes appears as though Holy Scripture contradicts itself?

The answer to this question is really the same that we give to those who ask why there are so many obscure passages in Scripture, since it is after all clear and plain. It has its various causes. None of them lies in Holy Scripture itself; all lie in man. None of them lies, properly speaking, in God, unless one should say with Augustine and others, when they speak of why, for example, the evangelists diverge in their accounts: "It pleased the Spirit of the LORD to let them diverge thus in their accounts, so that believers might draw from it a desire to search and find so much the greater riches, but those who do not wish to believe might take from it the offense they seek, to their well-deserved ruin."

Admittedly there are, in the first place, Bible readers who do not wish to believe, who look for contradictions just as they look for obscurities. When these find passages that seem to contradict one another, it is for them as if someone had given them a great present. Such people there have been since the days of Celsus, and there are masses of them to this very day. They are also the ones who, when a simple man without effort solves the riddle and points out the true meaning, nevertheless coin and stamp contradictions by force, indeed to their own well-deserved judgment.