# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Dezember 1856_S354
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

354 On the Doctrine of Election of Grace and Some Related Matters, etc.

Calvin, Beza, etc., are absolutists in the strictest sense; according to them
the fall into sin is itself included in the eternal decree willed by God, in
order that, through the election of grace or of wrath, His unconditional
plenitude of power might be demonstrated; whereas at the Synod of
Dordrecht the infralapsarian view prevailed instead, according to which it
was only with regard to the foreseen fall and the corruption of mankind
arising from it that the turning away of its consequences for some, and the
permitting of them for others, was determined in God — so that the
adherents of these canons agree with the teacher named above to this
extent, that he too, especially in his later writings, maintains that God does
no wrong whatsoever to those whom He passes over and accordingly
condemns, since it pleases His overflowing mercy to save others; in that,
through the belief that predestination also leads to an aeterno interitui, the
infinite majesty of God and unconditional submission to it are all the more
strongly asserted. Here now also emerges the divergence from the
Lutheran doctrinal position, in that, although they likewise relate the eternal
decree of God to the sin of Adam as its presupposition, and hold that, with
respect to it, the only mediating factor for them — as for the Formula of
Concord — can lie solely in the foreknowledge of the fall, by no means
made into a causal principle, the Formula, with the precision and
thoroughness befitting a confessional document, in its further course simply
sets side by side, without resolving, the irrational relation between those
two equally true propositions — on the one hand, the sheer impossibility for
man, without the working of divine grace, to attain to faith and salvation,
and, on the other, the sole guilt of the same man should he be lost — and,
bowing before the depths of the mystery of God's ways, remains
nevertheless unquestionably certain of their reconciliation; whereas the
Dordrecht theologians place the supreme, predetermining cause both of the
damnation and of the salvation of those now born in a sinful state simply
and solely in God and His beneplacitum absolutum, without — as the
Lutherans do — allowing the former to be conditioned in God by the
election occurring in foresight of a persevering faith, that is to say, and
along with Augustine share the disquieting harshness of holding that all
resistance is

*) [illegible]
are, God; that is, they are, because God is and their essentia is [in Him],
Luke 18:19, Romans 11:36. — What they are, they are in God and through
God. From which it can most clearly be inferred that, as God is to all their
being and subsistence, so He is likewise the life and the motion of all who
live and are moved, Acts 17." — (He takes as his basis the idea of the
exclusive infinity of God, and creation as emanation.) "Whoever should say
that a new being could be granted to things by the Godhead, which they had
taken neither from what was their own nor borrowed from another, so that
the new being of things would be something other than the being of the
Godhead — let him take the following for his answer: that there is by nature
only a single Infinite; but since the Infinite is called such precisely because
it is infinite according to its essentia and existentia, it is clear that besides
this Infinite no being can exist." De providentia, chapter 3. (Strikingly
similar to Hegel, Encyclopedia, §95, 2nd ed.) In his book De vera et falsa
religione, in the article on God near the end, he calls God a cumulus
expositus — gratis distrahi cupiens ["a heap laid open, freely wishing to be
drawn upon"]. The persons in the Godhead he calls notiones, in the article
on the Christian religion, at the beginning.