# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1947_S480
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

480 INTERSYNODICAL AND DOCTRINAL MATTERS

11. All men, since the Fall, are dead in sins, Eph, 2, 1—3, and
inclined only to evil, Gen. 6, 5; 8, 21; Rom. 8, 7. For this reason,
and particularly because men regard the Gospel of Christ, crucified
for the sins of the world, as foolishness, 1 Cor. 2, 14, faith in the
Gospel, or conversion to God, is neither wholly nor in the least
part the work of man, but the work of God’s grace and almighty
power alone, Phil. 1, 29; Eph. 2, 8; 1, 19; — Jer. 31, 18. Hence
Scripture calls the faith of man, or his conversion, a raising from
the dead, Eph. 1, 20; Col. 2, 12, a being born of God, John 1, 12. 13,
a new birth by the Gospel, 1 Pet. 1, 23—25, a work of God like the
creation of light at the creation of the world, 2 Cor. 4, 6.

12. On the basis of these clear statements of the Holy Scrip-
tures we reject every kind of synergism, that is, the doctrine that
conversion is wrought not by the grace and power of God alone,
but in part also by the cooperation of man himself, by man’s right
conduct, his right attitude, his right self-determination, his lesser
guilt or less evil conduct as compared with others, his refraining
from wilful resistance, or anything else whereby man’s conversion
and salvation is taken out of the gracious hands of God and made
to depend on what man does or leaves undone. For this refraining
from wilful resistance or from any kind of resistance is also solely
a work of grace, which “changes unwilling into willing men,”
Ezek. 36, 26; Phil. 2,13. We reject also the doctrine that man is
able to decide for conversion through “powers imparted by grace,”
since this doctrine presupposes that before conversion man still pos-
sesses spiritual powers by which he can make the right use of
such “powers imparted by grace.”

13. On the other hand, we reject also the Calvinistic per-
version of the doctrine of conversion, that’ is, the doctrine that
God does not desire to convert and save all hearers of the Word,
but only a portion of them. Many hearers of the Word indeed
remain unconverted and are not saved, not because God does
not earnestsly desire their conversion and salvation, but solely
because they stubbornly resist the gracious operation of the Holy
Ghost, as Scripture teaches, Acts 7, 51; Matt. 23, 37; Acts 13, 46.

14. As to the question why not all men are converted and
saved, seeing that God’s grace is universal and all men are equally
and utterly corrupt, we confess that we cannot answer it. From
Scripture we know only this; A man owes his conversion and
salvation, not to any lesser guilt or better conduct on his part, but
solely to the grace of God. But any man’s non-conversion is due
to himself alone: it is the result of his obstinate resistance against
the converting operation of the Holy Ghost, Hos. 13, 9.

15. Our refusal to go beyond what is revealed in these two
Scriptural truths is not “masked Calvinism” (“Cryptocalvinism”),