# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S29
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1902. 29

[As soon as] a man is converted, he receives the divine conviction that Scripture is God's Word. The experience must therefore come first: I believe in Jesus Christ; then follows the other: For that reason I also believe Christ and give him the honor when he says that the whole Scripture is divine truth.

The great difference between the natural sciences on the one hand and theology on the other is this: In nature, too, works of God confront us; but there is no letter of God attached that tells us what the things mean. There man is to and may study, draw conclusions, and in general use his reason, in order to understand God's works in nature and to arrive at a doctrine of nature. It is quite otherwise in theology. In Scripture we are not merely told facts, for example that God's Son became man, etc., but the doctrine also stands immediately with them. Scripture tells us how we are to understand the facts, what they mean for us men. I am not first to find out by human research what, for example, the death of Christ is to mean, but God himself tells me that in his Word. It is thoroughly perverse and senseless of the modern theologians when they say that one must derive theology from the "divine facts"; for theology draws no inferences back from facts but confesses what the Bible teaches about these facts. Our position is this: We ground our faith not on the divine facts in themselves but on the word of Holy Scripture, on the divine doctrine concerning these facts. For that reason we hold fast: Holy Scripture is the inspired Word of God in the sense that God in this Word has set before us and told us what Christian doctrine is. We are to seek our glory as theologians in saying nothing more than what stands written in Scripture. Even theologians, with all knowledge and research, do not get one line beyond the expressed Word of God. So it also happens that the most learned theologian can always be checked by any simple Christian.

Discussion of Individual Apparent Contradictions in the Bible.

Having now shown that it is indeed settled for a Christian that Holy Scripture cannot contradict itself, we can proceed, without the least apprehension that it might after all turn out otherwise in the end, to the discussion of the individual passages which, according to the assertion of so many, are to prove the opposite. Since it has become traditional nowadays to say that the apparent contradictions are also real contradictions, our investigation would lose all value if we undertook it from the outset with the presupposition that this traditional view must in any case come out. And our standpoint we will take in this not above or beside, but within Scripture.