# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1908_S26
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

26 Proceedings of the twenty-second convention

who bring their own word and say: The Lord hath said it." And to His people He cries not only in Jer. 23:16: "Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you. They make you vain: they speak a vision of their own heart," but He also commands His people to punish without mercy with death the prophets who teach something other than God's Word and thereby make them turn away from God's Word, Deut. 13:1-5. — In the New Testament God does not deal in this way with bodily punishments. But also in the New Testament there are teachers who teach something other than God's Word in the Church, forbidden existences with whom Christians are to have nothing to do, but whom they are to shun like a plague. The Apostle Paul opposes false teachers wherever they stir. At Ephesus there were evidently some teachers whom the Apostle did not quite trust as regards purity of doctrine. He therefore writes to Timothy (1 Tim. 1:4) to charge certain persons "that they teach no other doctrine" (μὴ ἑτεροδιδασκαλεῖν). Yes, at the beginning of the Epistle to the Galatians he pronounces the curse twice on the teachers who taught another gospel, Gal. 1:6-10. — As the whole Scripture is a revelation of the doctrine of Christ, so the whole Scripture is at the same time also a polemic against the false teachers, that is, against those who teach something other than God's Word. To teach something other than God's Word in the Church many regard, especially in our indifferentistic age, as something slight, indeed as something natural. According to Holy Scripture, however, it is, as said, an abnormity, a monstrosity. The Holy Spirit, so to speak, never tires of designating it as an abnormity and monstrosity.

According to this one should think, as already noted, that no Christian would hold to false teachers, but would carefully avoid them. But what happens? As those two hundred men went from Jerusalem with Absalom to Hebron and took part in the revolution in their simplicity, not knowing of the wicked cause, so also Christians out of weakness in knowledge go into the revolutionary camps, by following false teachers instead of fleeing from them. How does the devil manage this? In various ways. The pure doctrine he slanders, and the false doctrine he adorns with God's Word. By lies and calumny he seeks to arouse a prejudice against the orthodox church. Thus, for example, the Romanists slander the orthodox church: by our doctrine of justification, that God justifies without the works of the Law by faith alone, we promote the service of sin; the Calvinists: our doctrine of universal grace makes God an impotent idol, because in fact not all men would be saved after all; the synergists (Iowans and Ohioans): according to our doctrine of a conversion solely from the working of God's grace, God would not convert and save all men, and the like. Thereby the false teachers arouse a prejudice against the orthodox church. In many cases Christians also