# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1856_S329
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith, etc. 329

…be thwarted after all for most of them? The antecedent will, the first of those two moments, the gracious, earnest desire that no one be lost, Ezek. 18:23, has as its immediate consequence the universality of the reconciliation of Jesus Christ and of the divine call of grace (in the prophetic and apostolic revelation of God, whose echoes among the heathen, in the Old as in the New Testament, are contained in their sadly so disfigured legends); but because the second, the consequent will, John 6:39, conditions it by that of the creature — in no way in a synergistic sense, if a gratia irresistibilis is not otherwise to be maintained — on what, then, does the belief rest that the accomplishment of the divine purpose can in general not be thwarted? On God's eternal purpose to predestine those foreseen in their persevering faith: as it is indeed certain that, had God not foreknown that not all men (and angels) would be lost, their creation would not have taken place at all. And if the eternal Light has come into the world precisely for this reason — that the blind should see, but the seeing be blind, and, in those set for the fall and for judgment, the bitter enmity of the thoughts of the heart be made manifest, so that they may be without excuse — indeed, if the Church itself, through the efficacy of faith, possesses the power not only to loose sinners but also to bind, in a manner valid for eternity, and one day to judge even the angels — how could it succeed for devils and men, within the manifold interlocking members of the counsel of the one God, to glorify the elect through Himself, otherwise than by bringing only their powerless folly to light? We shall, to be sure, in this respect never be able to restrain the Most High, beyond what He has already made known, from also having His secret thoughts, for He dwells in a sanctuary to which no one can approach, and it is incomprehensible how He governs, until the Last Judgment on the last of all days unveils to us a perfect theodicy; but that the contrast between a hidden and a revealed divine will should become a sheer negation of the latter is the less grounded in Scripture the more clearly the contradiction has long since been demonstrated into which the defenders of particularism themselves become entangled; for their hidden will of God is rather the revealed one — for they could, after all, otherwise know nothing of its content and meaning, of its relation to the revealed will; their revealed will, in turn, is a hidden one — it reveals nothing, indeed it only conceals the true will of God insofar as it conflicts with that one. In Luther, as we shall see below, this distinction is never in any degree permitted to stunt the word of evangelical promise; not one grain of the poison that has infected the doctrine of a decretum absolutum has tainted him, since all the loci concerning the means of grace — baptism, the Supper, and, most tellingly here, absolution — proclaim aloud, in his teaching, the universality of the divine counsel. (Cf. Konkordienformel p. 1104 f., Latin p. 807 f. —) Who