# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1856_S330
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

330 How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Raised Up?

…has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been His counselor? On a grand scale is the order laid out, which does not from the outset exclude the possibility of its disturbance, but which also, from the outset, has within itself the means to overcome it, once it actually occurs. In the midst of its self-perversion, the willing of the creature remains ever borne up by the all-encompassing working of its God, and this is our surety that the goal will be reached, even if in a manner that we do not yet now understand. The holy will of that love which gladly sets bounds to its own omnipotence, in order to lead men to perfected blessedness — the ungrudging inclination of that love to impart itself to kindred beings capable of a love in return (which, without those self-limitations, would not be possible) — will surely also realize itself, and will present to us the created world as fully corresponding to the divine idea, in the inheritance of the saints. In that God beholds the citizens of His kingdom, become unchangeably one with His eternal will, in a timeless view, He likewise recognizes the self-limitation, real as it is, at the same time as one already abolished (just as the bound of conditionedness in man will one day vanish from him, when he, as he is constituted by God, fully affirms himself in the love of God, 1 John 3:2); and because, by virtue of His timeless knowledge, He recognizes from eternity the resistance to His will as something, at the end of this world's development, utterly overcome in all — for the justice of the punishment, whereby love confirms itself as that which alone is to prevail, and the harmony of the violated order restores itself with the divine majesty, is the energetic negation of every opposition — the parting of ways between God's willing and knowing, together with the divisions of the former with respect to the self-determination of created persons, is thus already absorbed into a higher unity. "Etenim si conditio, prout jam impleta est, spectetur, nullam amplius habet vim, adeoque non conditionata erit voluntas, sed absoluta" [For if the condition, once it is already fulfilled, be considered, it no longer has any force, and so the will shall be, not conditioned, but absolute], etc. — Buddeus, Institutt. theol. dogm., p. 225, whose excellent treatment of the various denominations of the divine will, in the passage cited, deserves to be read in preference to others.
(To be continued.)

(Submitted by Dr. Sihler.)

How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded
and Raised Up?
Third Article.
Church Discipline.
That this church discipline is a necessary part of the raising up of genuinely Lutheran congregations admits of no doubt; for it is, from the Lord Christ Himself, in Matt. 18:15–17, the proper seat of the doctrine concerning it