# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1916_S38
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

38 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth convention

seeks to destroy the Gospel, that he leads people to the works of the law, indeed often to self-chosen works, and thus cheats them of their salvation. They are to a large extent still his kindred spirits in this; they too trust and build on their works, on their virtues, and want to know nothing of the Gospel.

Enlightened eyes of understanding are needed to recognize rightly the wickedness of the Pope, his chief abomination, that he utterly roots out Christ and his Gospel and takes from men all comfort — eyes that are enlightened through the Gospel. And since God has graciously given the Lutheran Church the full inheritance of the Reformation, since by his grace she, as no other church, clearly recognizes, has and possesses the Gospel, it is quite consistent that precisely in her the right knowledge of the papacy and of its chief abomination is to be found. How do we judge the Pope? In what does his chief abomination consist? In his last and probably sharpest writing against the Pope, "Wider das Papſttum zu Rom, vom Teufel geſtiftet" [Against the Papacy at Rome, Founded by the Devil], of the year 1545, Luther writes thus: "This is the very worst bottom-dregs of all devils in hell, that he stretches such power" (that is, that he has set himself up as vicar of Christ, as head of all Christendom, to whom all Christians must be subject) "to the point that he wants to have power to set laws and articles of faith, to interpret Scripture (which he has never learned, cannot, and does not even want to know) according to his mad mind; wants to compel all the world to believe his doctrine, and yet teaches nothing but sheer idolatry, as we shall hear hereafter, and destroys everything that the Son of God, our Lord, has obtained for us with his blood; takes away faith, Christian liberty and true good works; and this he calls in his devilish, knavish decrees well done and obedience to the Church, and roars as one possessed and full of devils that whoever is not obedient to him and his Roman Church cannot be saved; whoever is obedient will be saved. And everything is done to the end that all the world be obedient and subject to him; of obedience to God and Christ he asks nothing, no thought of it enters his mind." (XVII, 1052.) Our Church has always taught and confessed that in the papacy that old prophecy of the apostle Paul is fulfilled, where he speaks in 2 Thess. 2:3 ff. of how before the end the falling away must come and "the man of sin, the son of perdition," must be revealed, "who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God." Thus our Church teaches and confesses in the Smalcald Articles: "There stand all his bulls and books, in which he roars like a lion (as the angel in Rev. 12:1 f. depicts), that no Christian can be saved unless he is obedient and subject to him in all things, whatever he wills, whatever he says, whatever he does. Which all is nothing else than so much as to say: