# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1856_S323
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith, etc. 323

…in itself does not conflict with human freedom. The inalienable consciousness that man has of a power of choice, apart from any relation of his soul's faculties to spiritual things, as well as the necessity of conceiving the knowledge in God as infinite, eternal, unchangeable, and thus His foreknowledge of the future contingent* acts of free beings as infallible and certain (cf. 1 Sam. 23:10–13), require their union, although for us, in our mortal state, it retains something mysterious. Before Him who is absolutely unlimited, everything that is comprised in His power and His will, whether it has already become ideal or objective, is equally present; that He has beforehand known and seen what will come to be does not at all mean that it is thereby necessarily so determined that it could not have become otherwise — its contingency, rather, where present, was no less known to God. Whether, with respect to the self-determinations of created beings, His will is not even determining, because He does not wish it to be, is another question; but how should the divine knowledge of these exercise a causal influence upon them, when it is precisely by this that we distinguish the one from the other — that it is not causative with respect to its object, and we rather say that the creature does not seize upon its decisions because God knows them, but rather, because they will be seized upon, He knows about them. The difficulty one makes for oneself, that what is certainly foreknown seems as though it must come to pass, could already be resolved by this, that for God Himself there is indeed no before and after; at bottom, however, just as the eternal, the timeless, is not — so still much less is an actual foreknowledge — necessitating with respect to the action that is its object, because the inner character of the latter, whether free or not, is in no way changed by the fact that someone knows it. Compare what Augustine, very beautifully — although with deterministic premises in what precedes — sets against Cicero, who denies the divinatio of the deity, de civ. Dei V, ch. 10, in that he calls attention to the fact that the connection of human actions, as of events generally, must be thought of as contained within the eternal plan of the world which God resolved to carry out according to His providence, and thus is not hidden from Him either, although the freedom of the acts of will is thereby all the less brought to nothing, since they belong among the secondary causes of what happens and have their place secured to them in the causarum ordine; His knowledge of them is to be held fast, like their arbitrium — the one, in order to believe rightly; the other, in order to live devoutly.**

* Note. Metaphysics is accustomed, in the German language, to express the concept of contingency, that is, of the possibility-of-being-otherwise, by the word "Zufälligkeit" (chance-ness). By the latter, then, is not to be understood here the fortuitum, the incalculable element for us of an event whose higher connection we do not know, although for the wisdom of God ruling over the whole it is serviceable to a determined purpose.

** Note. Only this much is to be the concept of the divine prescience of all things: that some of them, having arisen out of the freedom of individuals, must nevertheless be thought of as so woven into the causal nexus of the course of the world that God, who likewise surveys the consequences that would follow if they had not happened, or had happened otherwise, is entitled to require that the All-knowing