# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1856_S321
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume II.          November 1856.          No. 11.

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith.
(By Past. O. Fürbringer.)

(Continued.)
B. Further Dogmatic Development.
Thesis I.

Quite consistently, the preceding remarks compel us to the question: Is God's eternal election of grace, for His believers, the cause of their salvation in such a way that it first works faith? It is above all to be firmly held that it is, first, neither the ground, nor the means, nor the condition of salvation; for these are Christ, His Gospel, and the faith given through it. Second, it is also not the cause of our faith, insofar as the latter would be its effect; for it is the Word that creates faith. But because the election of God determines or ordains beforehand, for salvation, His own whom He knows: it is indeed the cause that works their salvation in this sense, that all things in the time of grace only serve and must accommodate themselves to this end — the cause that brings it about that the faith foreseen, and what follows from it, attains reality by virtue of the Word that comes to us and is powerfully felt by all who hear it. This is the point of difference that separates the pure doctrine from the Reformed-particularist one, namely, that the power of the divine word for conversion and regeneration does not presuppose predestination, and in general may not be represented as something separated from the word heard or read, as subsisting entirely independent of the latter within the inner disposition; rather, the justifying and renewing faith is the communicated power of that word itself and is born from it alone. Through and in this outward word he lays hold of Christ and the treasure of His merit, which offers itself equally to the whole world of sinners, for the sake of which he is reckoned to man for righteousness — so that to him the Gospel of Scripture is the glad tidings of salvation and help there, where otherwise all would be lost, (not a mere exhorting and reminding doctrine, to seek the things within ourselves,

21