# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1904_S175
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History. 175

One speaker went so far as to declare that even such sun-clear passages as John 3:16 receive their full light only from other passages. From John 3:16 taken by itself, he said, one could not tell what kind of world it is that God loved, namely a sinful world; John 3:16 says nothing about the incarnation of the Son of God and the nature of redemption; from John 3:16 one cannot determine what faith is, whether a Christian virtue or the apprehending of Christ's merit. All this becomes clear only when one takes other passages of Scripture and the whole of Scripture along with it.

Another speaker, an old opponent of the Synodical Conference, drew the doctrine of conversion into the discussion as well, confessing his synergism in optima forma and arguing, after the manner of the more recent theologians, that through God's grace the lost freedom of choice is first restored in all who hear the Gospel, and that then man, that is, natural, still unconverted man, can use this freedom in either direction and choose between death and life at his own free discretion, deciding whether he will let himself be helped or refuse God's help.

What the representatives of the Synodical Conference said on the question before the house may be summed up roughly as follows: What is called the analogy of faith, or the norma docendi, is the scriptura clara, or, as the Apology says, scripturae clarae et perspicuae, the sum of the clear, plain passages of Scripture. The individual articles of faith and doctrinal propositions we draw, and that exclusively, from those clear statements of Scripture that treat the very matter which forms the content of the article of faith in question, the sedes doctrinae. The doctrine of election of grace, for example, we take from the passages of Scripture that speak of God's eternal election and ordination; and we take all these passages together, so that we may get the right concept of election; but we add no other Bible passage, no passage that does not treat of election, so that we do not blur, darken, and pervert the scriptural concept of election.

There is, to be sure, a connection among all the doctrines of Scripture; none contradicts another. And therefore every doctrinal statement is false that stands in contradictory opposition to any clear word of Scripture. But we can recognize that connection only so far as Scripture itself expressly shows it. And that is the case to a very small degree. For our knowledge at any given time the canon holds: "We know in part," ek merous ginōskomen, 1 Cor. 13:9. And therefore we cannot and should not make the various doctrines of Scripture, such as the doctrine of God's universal will of grace and the doctrine of election of grace, rhyme together with our reason, neither with natural reason nor with enlightened reason.

From the fundamental doctrines of the universal will of salvation and of universal redemption, which all Christians know well, we see at once that the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination is perverse. But these same fundamental doctrines give us not the least light on how matters actually stand with predestination. The fundamental article of justification by faith tells us not a word, not a syllable, about the place of faith in election, whether we are elected in view of faith or unto faith. That we learn solely from the passages of Scripture that treat of election. There are, indeed, expressions and concepts in the scriptural doctrine of election that meet us in other articles of doctrine as well, such as "in Christ," "by grace." But what makes up the doctrine of election, the substance of this doctrine, we recognize only from the sedes doctrinae de electione.

At bottom one can think nothing at all when one says that every doctrine must be judged and measured not only by the sedes doctrinae but also, and above all, by the whole of Scripture, by the doctrinal whole, by the connection, as the highest norm.