# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1855_S235
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

19 Theses on the Doctrine, etc. 235

appropriation of Christ and His merit from the Gospel and Holy Baptism, through which faith a person obtains the forgiveness of sins and justification before God, the gift of the Holy Spirit, adoption as a child of God, and eternal life. Thus, this faith is the sole means of appropriating the salvation in Christ offered in the Gospel and Sacrament. 2 Thessalonians 2:13; Romans 5:1; Romans 3:24–26; Galatians 3:2, 26; John 3:16; John 6:40; Romans 1:16.

E. Sanctification in love, preservation amid the temptations of the devil, the world, and the flesh, confirmation to the end, and glorification in eternal life. This is the way by which the Holy Spirit brings the work begun in us to its blessed completion.

Thesis 5. Whoever refuses to submit to this order of God, if he persists in resistance or apostasy, thereby reveals that he is not elect; by contrast, whoever allows himself to be brought into this order (Acts 13:48) and perseveres in it to the end proves that he is elect to eternal life. Romans 8:29–30.

Thesis 6. The sole cause of human salvation, therefore, is the grace of the Father, the merit of the Son, and the power of the Holy Spirit, who through the Gospel creates, nourishes, and preserves faith; the sole cause of a person’s eternal damnation is his willful and persistent unbelief against the grace of God in Christ offered in the Gospel. John 3:18, 36; Mark 16:16; Matthew 22:3; Luke 14:16; Hosea 13:9; Romans 9:22–23.

Thesis 7. It is therefore a shameful and blasphemous false doctrine that God, by an unconditional decree from eternity, predestined the greater part of humanity to eternal damnation in order to display upon them the severity of His holy punitive justice; that He therefore does not call them in true earnest at all and does not wish to create faith in them at all, while grace works irresistibly in the elect.

Thesis 8. This assertion, which arises from the brazen curiosity of carnal reason and from the natural human intellect’s fabrication of deductions that go beyond the revealed Word of God, conflicts:

A. with God’s antecedent universal will of grace;

B. with Christ’s merit, which in respect to its accomplishment and acquisition extends to all people, including the ungodly (2 Peter 2:1);

C. with the offering of the Gospel made to all nations (see the proofs for Thesis 4).

Thesis 9. By contrast, this assertion turns God, who is as holy and righteous as He is gracious and merciful, as His Word reveals Him to us, into a capriciously arbitrary, deceitful, cruel, pagan-Mohammedan god of fate, indeed into the author of the sin of all sins, namely unbelief against Christ, since no one predestined to eternal damnation—