# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Dezember 1856_S353
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume II.                    December 1856.                    No. 12.

On the Doctrine of Election of Grace and Some Related Matters.
(By Pastor O. Fürbringer.)

(Continued.)

The wise men of this world, as well as theological thinkers, have from of
old divided into two camps over the effort to solve the task immediately
before us and the problems bound up with it. To the richly gifted spirit of
Augustine, acknowledged the greatest among the latter, it was granted to
become a light, indeed, for the long night of the following centuries of the
Middle Ages. Fully in the sense of the Formula of Concord he distinguishes
divine predestination from prescience, whose conceptual scope he by no
means equates with that of foreknowledge, and, with his penetrating insight
into the coherence of Christian doctrine, excludes — as the church did with
one voice before him — sin from the domain of God's predetermination,
in that its essential foreseeing has as its ground the free act of the first man,
through which evil came into the whole human race, namely Adam's fall, in
which at the same time every individual deriving its origin from him became
guilty. But when Zwingli, however,*)

*) Note. Shudder-inducing is the coldness with which the aforementioned
thinker asserts the error afterward developed with such iron consistency by
Calvin, that all [illegible] freedom is merely an empty appearance, and that
an absolute necessity underlies both good and evil alike, and does not
shrink from regarding sin, in a starkly Manichean fashion, as a naturally
necessary consequence of bodily life; the relapse into Nestorianism in
Christology was an easily explicable consequence of this. The following
passages are transparent: "Knowingly and deliberately God formed man in
the beginning in such a way that he had to fall." Ad Carolum Caesarem,
§2, De providentia, chapter 5, beginning, chapter 7, middle, etc. "Sinners sin
against the law not as authors but as instruments, which God may freely use
according to His will, as a master of the house draws water or pours it out.
And when He moves the instrument to some act which brings harm to that
very instrument, this brings Him no harm nonetheless, for He moves it with
keenness. Nor does He do the instrument any wrong, since all things belong
to Him more than a workman's tools belong to the workman, and therefore
He does no wrong when He now turns a file into a hammer, now smashes it.
Thus He it is who moves the murderer to murder," etc. De providentia,
chapter 6. It can the less astonish us that his starting point is an abstractly
pantheistic assertion: "Since all things that exist are good, and yet God
alone is good: so too are all things, which