# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1916_S50
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

50 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth convention

the one Word, preached and written by me, has accomplished and done all this. If I had also proceeded herein with force and violence, I should probably have started such a game that Germany would thereby have fallen into great bloodshed. But what would it have been? A fool's game it would have been and a ruin of body and soul. I sat still and let the Word act." (XX, 20, 21.) Another time he says in his exposition of the eighth Psalm (V, 210): "What happens in our time? The Pope lacks no learned, clever, intelligent people, but surpasses us far in art, wit and understanding. Yet he accomplishes nothing against us. We do nothing more than open our mouth and drive the Word confidently. Such a battle we wage with the Pope. We draw no sword, fire no guns, but with the Word, the Lord's Prayer, the children's creed, the Gospel we set up a power so strong and mighty that it lays low priestcraft, monkery, nunnery and the whole papacy. He holds our Gospel for fool's preaching, indeed for heresy, but he must be terrified at it and go to the ground. For the Lord, our Ruler, is much stronger than the devil, Pope and world. He knows the art: when he makes himself weak, he is strongest. With weakness and lack of strength he begins it, lets his Word be preached, which the world holds for child's play, folly and foolishness. But through such weakness and lack of strength he is so mighty that he brings to shame all other word, power and wisdom in the world."

This we must learn from Luther, that we use this weapon alone against the Pope. Only this is the right weapon in this spiritual struggle. No man is in truth safe from the Pope and his seduction except he who has experienced the truth of the Gospel in his heart, who lives in the Gospel. Every man, even if he does not acknowledge the Pope, is by nature nevertheless in the Pope's kingdom. Everyone who wants to be saved at all wants by nature to be saved through his merit, through his doing and work, wants to contribute something toward his salvation, just as the Pope teaches. Out of this work-righteousness, out of trust in his doing, a man comes only through God's Word, in that God terrifies his heart through the voice of the Law, so that he recognizes that he is lost with his doing and deserves only God's wrath, in that the Lord shows him in the Gospel the Savior of sinners, who has found a fully valid redemption, and through this Gospel overcomes the sinner, brings him to faith in this his Savior and makes him certain of reconciliation and salvation, makes him a blessed child of God. Such a man is inwardly free of the Pope and his kingdom, he is preserved from his seductions. Neither the apparent holiness of the Pope makes an impression on him, nor his arrogated dignity and power, that he is the