# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S23
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1902. 23

Into this category belongs, of course, also the much-talked-of David Friedrich Strauß with his well-known book on the life of Jesus. Of him a Württemberg theologian, and indeed not one who passes for a strict Lutheran but one who would rather pass for the opposite, when Strauß's last book was published and he was asked for his opinion, made the remark: of Strauß one could say with right, even though he was still alive: "LORD, by this time he stinketh."

Further, there are many Bible readers who read Holy Scripture without any spiritual sense and without any spiritual experience. They read Moses and the prophets, the evangelists and the apostles as they read Virgil and Cicero, Shakespeare and Goethe. They lack the experience and the living knowledge of the so important distinction between Law and Gospel, and this lack is, as Althamer already rightly points out, a chief reason why so many irresolvable contradictions seem to them to be in Scripture. How are they to reconcile it, when it says at one time: "I will not be angry for ever," and at another: "They shall go into everlasting pain"; at one time: "I am not come to judge the world," and at another: "For judgment I am come into this world." For them these are indeed irresolvable contradictions, they remain for them Bohemian villages [that is, all Greek to them] until, through the Law, they have come to the knowledge of their sins and, through the Gospel, to the knowledge of the grace of God in Christ Jesus. Then the veil and the curtain are taken away from their eyes, which hangs before them just as it does before the eyes of the Jews, in whose schools the Law and the prophets are still read every Sabbath.

Then there is further a large class of Bible readers who find contradictions in Scripture because, although they come to the reading of Scripture not wholly without all spiritual experience, they come with preconceived opinions and views which they have not drawn from Scripture but taken from elsewhere, whether from the pope or from their own, as they say, enlightened reason. If Scripture then says something other than what they have in their head or heart — which cannot fail to happen — they say that Scripture contradicts itself. So it is certainly no wonder if a papal lackey finds the words of Jesus to the thief on the right hand, "Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise," contradictory to the books of the Maccabees, which are given out to him as canonical, and cannot grasp how that is to be reconciled with the doctrine of purgatory. In those, again, who assume two mutually contradictory wills in God, it is certainly no wonder if on occasion they also declare two words that God has spoken to be contradicting one another.

Then there are people who want to be called evangelical, indeed perhaps Lutheran — and their number is legion, especially among German theologians too — who do say that in the Bible is God's Word, but who do not dare to confess