# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S28
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

28 Proceedings of the nineteenth convention

[whoever] is an unbeliever has the opposite conviction concerning justification. With this prejudice every unbeliever approaches Holy Scripture; it makes no difference whether he is educated or uneducated. It is therefore foolhardiness when such a man takes it upon himself to want to exercise criticism on Scripture. Whereas, on the other hand, whoever believes in Christ as his Savior and therefore lives in the house of God hears the voice of his God in Scripture and rejoices over it. He is favorably disposed toward Scripture. Where contradictions seem to be in it, he does not let that trouble him greatly. He lives in the conviction that Scripture cannot be broken, even if the inviolable truth of it is not immediately evident to us men here and there.

When a man says: I accept Scripture as free of contradiction before all testing, it is to be presupposed that he has the Holy Spirit and is a converted Christian. An unbeliever does not speak so, however benevolent he may otherwise pretend to be. The explanation is simple. We are by nature all children of darkness; Scripture, however, is the light of God. So it is natural that the light is against the darkness and the darkness against the light. To point an unconverted man to Christ's word that Scripture cannot be broken, and to demand of him acceptance of this word, is unreasonable; for God converts man in a way other than by arguments, demonstrations and the like. God uses his Holy Scripture on us not as a scholar's book but as a practical means of bringing us out of darkness into light, to repentance, to saving faith. If we have this faith, and the Holy Spirit dwells in us, then he gives us the testimony to the divinity of Holy Scripture. That is not one and the same with what is called "experience," but something that lifts a man at one stroke above all real doubt and uncertainty. If he is disturbed once, he then has his standpoint again at once through the Holy Spirit. This testimony of the Holy Spirit we receive only through Scripture itself, through the written Word of God, and it remains with us only through that same written Word of God; whoever does not deal with this Word will lose the testimony again. In this the true, deep understanding of Holy Scripture and its purpose shows itself among us Lutherans.

No man has the real conviction that Scripture is God's Word until he has become a child of God. Christ says expressly: "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself," John 7:17. "It is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth," 1 John 5:6. An unconverted man can have a so-called human conviction that the content of the Bible is truth; but this conviction can also be overthrown again by human arguments. As soon as