# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1904_S174
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

174 Church and Contemporary History.

[…] let me tell you that, apart from the grace of God, I know of no single reason why I am not lying here in his place!'" Had Boerhave been a synergist, he would have had to explain to his students something like this: Here you see how small causes can have great effects. This malefactor, whose corpse we are now dissecting, and I have enjoyed the same grace of God. And that I am not now lying in his place I owe solely and alone to a quite slight circumstance, which one might call a negativum rather than a positivum quid: namely, that I did not, like this man here, wilfully resist the grace of God. This aliqua actio dissimilis is the ultimate reason why I am now the "honored Boerhave," while this man here is an executed malefactor.

F. B.

The Free Conference in Detroit. At the free conference held last September in Milwaukee by members of various synods of the Lutheran name, a dissensus had come to light, while the Scripture doctrine of election of grace was under discussion, over the principle of Scripture interpretation, over the nature and meaning of the so-called analogia fidei; and it had been agreed that at the next conference the discussion would turn first to this difference. That has now been done. The third of these free conferences met in Detroit from 6 to 8 April. A committee appointed in Milwaukee had meanwhile deliberated, in December of last year in Chicago and then on 5 April in Detroit, without reaching agreement, and it now proposed to the plenum of the conference that two questions be discussed: 1. What is the analogy of faith? 2. How is this analogy of faith to be used? There followed the two-day disputation now to be described. The matter at issue, then, was the principles of Scripture interpretation, indeed the use of Scripture as norma docendi. The doctrinal positions of the two parties, as they were set out in various and also rather long speeches, we can sketch here only in a few brief sentences.

The representatives of the Ohio and Iowa Synods argued roughly as follows: Holy Scripture is the only source of Christian doctrine. The individual articles of faith are to be drawn from the clear passages of Scripture that treat the matter in question, as the proper seats of the doctrine. Yet the Christian doctrines form a harmonious whole or system, recognizable to the Christian and especially to the theologian. This whole is composed of the perfectly clear passages of Scripture. And this organic whole stands, as the highest norm of Scripture interpretation and indeed of doctrine, even above the parallelism or comparison of the passages that treat the same doctrine; in other words, it forms the analogy of faith, by which every interpretation of Scripture and every doctrine must be measured. Especially when, in the otherwise clear parallel passages that treat a particular doctrine, there are expressions or sentences that can be interpreted in different ways, or in fact are interpreted in different ways, this highest norm must decide which is the right interpretation. Only then is an interpretation of Scripture, a doctrinal statement, correct, when it agrees with the doctrinal whole of the Gospel, above all with its fundamental doctrines, which every Christian knows well. From the passages that speak of election of grace, for example, it cannot be proved with full evidence what the relation of faith to God's eternal election is. So one must here take the doctrinal whole to help, and above all consult the fundamental doctrines of Scripture, such as those of the universal will of salvation and of justification by faith, and see what place faith holds there. From this it follows that God has elected us for the sake of Christ's merit apprehended in faith, or, in short, in view of faith.