# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Dezember 1856_S356
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

sary unity, however, is maintained in that, in the one, the other is always
thought of as its complement. And in particular Luther had to deal with an
opponent whose haughty, provocative, yet at the same time soft — and
averse to the great earnestness of faith — disposition could, if at all, only
be won over by giving preponderance to the side of the matter, so intimately
interwoven with the fundamental conditions of salvation, that this opponent
had misjudged and altogether failed to grasp. A higher point of view thus
underlies it when this man, mighty even in his humility, writes on p. 14:
"If this stands fast, that God through His eternal, immovable counsel and
will has foreseen all things, and also through the same makes, works, and
creates all things, then this thunderclap strikes to the ground free will,
together with all the grounds that may be brought forward for it. — You say
that God's will is unchangeable, and yet you do not want us to teach that
God's eternal foreknowledge is likewise unchangeable? Do you suppose that
He foresees something apart from His will, or wills something that He does
not know, since His foreknowledge does not occur apart from His will? If
His will is unchangeable and eternal because it is the divine nature and
essence itself, then His foreknowledge too is unchangeable and eternal,
because it is likewise the divine nature and essence itself." By this he
certainly means to say that knowing and willing, though they are not the
same thing, nevertheless encompass the domain of divine action to an equal
degree, so that the evil which God knows is also permitted by His will, and,
insofar as it is good — that is, works toward the good, Romans 8:28 — is
willed from eternity to take effect; the concept of cooperation, however,
which Luther himself holds in this very book, pp. 54, 119, presupposes and
includes within itself free finite causality, so that undeniably God at the
same time knows more than He wills — namely, evil, insofar as it is evil.
Conversely, the Socinians held: God wills many things that He does not
know — that is, He wills the salvation of men of whom He does not yet
know infallibly whether they will attain it through faith. Against this,
however, it must certainly be maintained that He foresees only with and
according to His will; since He now knows whether someone will persevere
in the faith or not, He also wills it just as He knows it. Hence the
conclusion on pp. 81–95: "That everything happens solely according to the
eternal will of God, and that it must accordingly happen with us just as He
wills." See also, among other places, p. 89: "If God has from eternity
foreseen that Judas must become a traitor, then he has had to betray, and it
was not in the power of Judas or of any creature to make it otherwise or to
change the will — although he did this willingly and not under compulsion.
But the willing itself, as it existed in Judas, was God's work, who through
His almighty will set it in motion, as He does all other creatures. — Since
God cannot fail in that which He has foreseen, that which is foreseen must
necessarily come to pass." Cf. p. 91 and following. Not so as to attach to
everything that happens, in the sense of an absolutely equally conditioning
necessity, [the notion] that upon the ever-active power of divine knowledge,
determined in this very way,