# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1856_S328
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

— Does God not, then, nevertheless have purposes which He in part never attains? To what end His holy Law, if it is not to be, and cannot be, a guide to righteousness? Is it perhaps given only for this, to be transgressed by men? It is meant to be the schoolmaster leading to Christ and His salvation, to shape in Him the life of faith as one willed by God, and to keep the despisers confined and shut up under its verdict. Should the Redeemer's appointment for the whole fallen race, the surrender of so precious a life to unheard-of death-agonies, the accomplishment of a work of overflowing satisfaction, and the offering of the same through the preaching of the Gospel in all the world, have happened only in order that…

…thus He thinks much that He does not create; but because His wisdom finds it good to create only that which is, this conditioning factor at the same time limits the general willing of His thought to something determinate that exists. If God is absolute personality, then His will too is lord over its own efficacy; a necessity to actualize everything that is possible to His omnipotence would utterly abolish this holy truth. If He is the most perfectly freely willing being, then He is also holy, that is, a love that affirms itself and excludes its opposite from itself; what higher thing could now be conceived in revelation than the creation and preservation, flowing from that love, of a world in which beings like Him should become partakers of His perfect fellowship? He who is self-sufficient and most real in Himself does not need, for His perfection, that everything to which possibility belongs should also become real; in free love He sets before Himself, as end, what His power and wisdom accomplishes; from what is possible to Him, His will determines itself to that which He actualizes; here there falls upon the divine being so little a limitation that it is, rather, a necessary presupposition of that unbounded freedom of His — conceived in unity with love — that not everything present in His thought should pass over into external existence, or be worked exclusively and solely by Him. When Kantians, etc., among the theologians — so far allied with the predestinarians — deny the so-called scientia Dei media (or of futuribilia, that is, of the future conditioned), on the ground that an intuiting understanding can have no other object than the actual: they thereby forget that for God Himself the distinction between ideality and reality is not applicable; in Scripture, the matter underlying this unnecessary form of doctrine (also as it concerns man's relation to saving grace, Matt. 11:21, whose visitation Tyre and Sidon, in the New Testament, are said to have abundantly experienced still — cf. Acts 14:16; 17:30; 21:3 ff.; 27:3; Matt. 20:7) is the proof-text cited above from 1 Sam. 23; grounded on which, we would rather, following its guidance, anthropopathize the divine being for ourselves than utterly forfeit the idea of His intelligence. Cf. Buddeus, Institutt. theol. dogm., p. 216 ff., where, incidentally — as some have long done, though others have not — the scientia Dei naturalis, or necessaria, is identified with the scientia simplicis intelligentiae, and the scientia libera with the scientia visionis, and the differing point of view from which such distinctions proceed is not attended to; the latter [science] embraces God Himself and the things outside Him, the first embraces God and everything possible, the second only this, namely because we merely think it, whereas we perceive that which actually is; the third is that which is outside God, because it stands in connection with His free counsel to call the actual into existence. Rightly, however, one has not excluded the self-contradictory and impossible — although it cannot be an object of the divine power — from the objects of omniscience, because at least the thoughts of creatures cannot be hidden from it. It would likewise be self-contradictory to assert that, through finite being, the infinite fullness of the power in God is covered over and thus abolished, without itself remaining anything other than a possibility that never actually becomes real.