# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Dezember 1856_S355
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of Election of Grace and Some Related Matters, etc. 355

working of God that breaks in of necessity, through a precise and careful
relating of the gratia praeveniens and the donum perseverantiae, so far as
this was possible.

With power and emphasis Luther — perhaps surpassed by the Bishop of
Hippo in natural gifts, but equipped, through still hotter inward struggles, to
dig after the golden treasure of the Word concerning the high and heavy
trial presented by the article of election, and to promote the understanding
of it among the Christian people, as well as to rescue it from the rubble of
mutilating interpretation — asserted, in his contest against Erasmus, and
quite pre-eminently so, the unshakable basis of biblical anthropology
gained through that struggle, secured by his own experience and the great
certainty of the Holy Spirit. If, in his treatise De servo arbitrio, he lets
prescience be taken up into predestination and, as it were, coincide with it,
just as Augustine likewise sometimes does, then this undeniably has its own
good justification in a consistent view of the indivisibility of the divine
essence, even while, in application, he only distinguishes the two concepts
from one another, and accordingly is by no means at odds with the
symbolical books of the church itself. On what ground, then, he has been
made a supralapsarian — unless it is a gross misunderstanding of sacred
truth itself — let God judge, since he consistently traced the guilt of the
hardening and final rejection of the wicked back, not to God, but always
to the evil will of men and of the devil! With clarity and deliberate speech
he expresses this where, in the place cited (Leipzig edition, vol. XIX),
p. 86, he says: "Item, that God also so drives the will of Satan, which He
finds evil and does not newly make evil in him, because Satan through his
falling away has a corrupted will and is forsaken of God," etc. — — "For
Pharaoh's hardening likewise comes about thus: outwardly God holds
something before his evil will, to which He is by nature opposed, namely
His Word, and inwardly He does not cease to govern this evil will of his,
which He finds evil," etc. One ought, above all, not to forget that Luther, in
this entire treatise, moves from the standpoint of a knowledge of God
grasped in its depth, according to which one and the same act — which,
depending on the resolve of a creature's will, is at the same time to be
thought of as encompassed by the omnipotence of the Infinite and thus also
brought about and willed by Him — is not to be thought willed by Him,
however, so far as it is evil, but rather because the divine cooperation
toward evil is not an operatio directed toward evil but toward good, without
thereby either transforming evil, as a property of the finite will, into a mere
appearance, or, still less, excluding that will's own causality. (An evil
thought, as an evil thought, is not from God but from man or the devil; as a
thought, however, it is from God and the creature together.) According as
the contemplative or the ethical point of view predominates, one remains
more at the relation of a general dependence or of relative self-subsistence,
their neces-