# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S24
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

24 Proceedings of the nineteenth convention

[to confess] that the whole Bible is God's Word, that there is no human word in it. These find contradictions in the Bible too; they cannot escape that at all. If one part of Scripture is a human word and not God's Word, if the Holy Spirit did not carry inspiration so far as to lead the holy men into all truth, what is more natural than that, where they were left to themselves, they made all the mistakes that are inseparable from human works: errors, false conceptions, lapses of memory and whatever else of the kind there is? The elder Philippi himself says in his "Glaubenslehre" [Doctrine of Faith]: "One need not from the outset resist the recognition of the possibility that some subordinate differences are really present and remain unresolved." Much more strongly, however, Kahnis expresses himself, for example: "The presupposition that the Gospels are free of all inaccuracies and contradictions is incompatible with the eternal laws which the Creator has laid in the knowing spirit." ("Zeugniß v. d. Grundwahrh. d. Prot." [Testimony Concerning the Basic Truth of Protestantism], p. 76.) And when it is put to him: You offend the congregation of God when you speak of contradictions in Holy Scripture, he asks, quite excited (p. 78): "Am I to speak against my conviction, or be silent? Or am I perhaps to say, although I am firmly convinced that here or there an insoluble contradiction is present, 'Nevertheless, out of faith I will say it is not present'?" That there is also another possible case, namely that his "enlightened" reason has indeed not yet found the solution, but other people have long since found a good and satisfying way out, the thought does not seem to occur to him at all. That is also not very surprising. "We theologians," he says on p. 134, "are now to test everything: doctrine of Scripture, church history, church faith, church life. If we are to do that, we must be in a position, for the moment of testing, to take a standpoint above the matter; otherwise the testing sinks to mere play. As soon as I know of a theologian that he undertakes every test on the presupposition that the traditional view must in any case come out, his testing has no value at all." But is that true? Are we theologians to test everything: doctrine of Scripture, church history, church faith, church life? Yes, church history, church faith, church life certainly; but the doctrine of Scripture we will not test, but accept as it reads, and by it test everything that we think, say, believe, write and have printed. And not only every theologian is bound to this testing, but every Christian, be he pastor or layman. As to the claim, however, that one must be in a position, for the moment of testing, to take a standpoint above the matter, and that without such a position the testing is worthless, there can really be no standpoint above Scripture, however high, but only one within it. And the closer one stays precisely within it, the more exactly can