# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1856_S327
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith, etc. 327

…as a commanding will is excluded; the possibility is given for this purpose only, that it should always, through conformity with the norm of the divine law, be abolished by the created will; if this is not realized, then a reality arises that is foreign and contrary to the divine will, but which nevertheless remains no less present to God's knowledge. Compare Quenstedt, Theol. didactico-polemica, II, p. 100 f.; Hollaz, Exam. theol., ed. 1750, p. 495 f. (Romanus Teller, in the note: "Aliud est, Deus volens permittit; aliud, permittens vult peccatum" [It is one thing that God, willing, permits; another, that, permitting, He wills sin] — as well as, shortly before: "Deus permittit peccatum tolerando nec violenter impediendo, interea tamen indigne ferendo," etc.) [God permits sin by tolerating it and not forcibly preventing it, while nevertheless bearing it with displeasure].

The difficulty designated above thus lies more precisely in this: whether it is compatible with the divine causality that the being created and conditioned by it should at the same time also possess a power to determine itself, in a derived manner, unconditionally, for something — whereby a certain self-restraint of God's will, within His causative all-efficacy, would have to be posited for this case. It is not thereby meant to be said from the outset that what is possible for God must go beyond the totality of that which, through His will, actually comes to be at all times — for that would be only a possibility that could never become actual, and thus, in truth, could not even be a possibility; no, rather, since it is indeed His very will that the circle of His omnipotence should ideally extend further than that which actually happens — the concern here, then, is first of all to gain, for the above question and for the domain of creaturely freedom, the concept of a will of God that is self-conditioning (and, in that sense, merely conditioned) — not in the sense of the Reformed predestinarians, who, under the decretis Dei conditionatis, understand only the relation, established by God, of created beings, according to which, within the divine willing itself, some are made the presupposition of others, but rather to the extent that God, in the relations in which His will, within the sphere of the created order, is meant to be a conditioned one, thereby abolishes its immediate relation to its own final outcome. Nor is it meant to be an ineffectual will, standing in conflict with His power; for the moment of universality within it, which pertains to being and becoming in an absolute sense, actualizes itself in the more proximate outcome, yet is inseparably one with the particular, which requires mediation through creaturely self-determination; taken in its totality, it limits the former by the condition given in the latter, to those in whom alone it is fulfilled, and therefore, because it depends at the same time on creatures here, the self-limitation of the almighty divine will sets in, a will whose moments must be kept distinct from one another if one does not wish to introduce insoluble confusion into the dogmatic subject-matter.*

* Note. God's will, even apart from the particular relation shown here, is always an effective one, even though not everything that is possible becomes an actuality; wherefore notable theologians have thought it more advisable to refrain from the distinction between voluntas efficax and inefficax (effective and ineffective will). God does, to be sure, think and will