# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1856_S326
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

…to what extent it is against His will, it may not be regarded as necessary and unavoidable; that which He, however, when not otherwise, or to whatever extent, willed by Him, has not merely foreknown and resolved not to hinder within His eternal counsel, He nevertheless, on the other side, brings about and fits into the coherence of the idea of the world and its members, just as He has undertaken to set in motion everything He does. There would thus be no hesitation in admitting the concept of a permitting divine will, which, however, would be wholly inseparably bound up with the eternal, effecting (determining) will, and would stand to it, only according to certain relations, in the same proportion as foreknowledge stands to predetermination. It is an error when one thinks to compromise God's absoluteness, on the one hand, by ascribing to Him an objective knowledge, on the ground that this, as such, would not at the same time be His absolute determining — for where we fail to do this, we entirely erase the distinction between knowing and willing, and in general no longer have any right to speak of a divine knowledge at all, since God's thinking would then essentially be nothing other than His creative power; and, on the other hand, by the claim that a self-limitation of the almighty will is being asserted — for this is so far from being a diminution of it that it, rather, does not remain what it ought to be by its own concept, if one denies that God can permit anything, insofar as its ultimate positive determining ground must then, after all, lie elsewhere. On this there is no doubt: such an eternally omnipresent causality, which must work everywhere exclusively and absolutely, thereby necessarily places all other beings in passivity; but is not, through such notions — however modified they may be — the divine as well as the created personality inescapably and invariably dragged down to a homogeneity with the working of determined natural forces? The freest being does not truly have itself in its own power if it can never renounce being, at once, the cause in turn of everything possible, such that it also actually comes to be — and evil has its ultimate origin in the will of God. Is this will, then, in the realm of the ethical, for creatures only an effecting one — just as, from nature, in contrast to the rational spirit, nothing can arise and be an object of the divine knowledge except what is set within it precisely through the will of God, which is fully conscious of its own activity and its purpose — and although His knowledge as such never causes, is there nevertheless nothing in it, in this respect, that would not also be in His bringing-forth will? The concept of permitting, within the divine being, does not stand opposed merely to His self-effecting; with respect to the ethical good in His creatures, God's will indeed limits itself, without doubt, to being a commanding one, a giver of commandment, and thereby at the same time establishes the possibility that from these creatures — with the inclusion of His all-pervading, but here not simultaneously necessarily determining, power — either that or its opposite may occur, which, as such, of His causing,