# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Dezember 1856_S357
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of Election of Grace and Some Related Matters, etc. 357

of knowing and willing, the doctrine of predestination be grounded in the
last instance (see p. 92, where he says that God "does not do much that He
nevertheless has the power to do") — as the Swiss theologians*) did, who
with great confidence ventured to determine the purposes God must have
pursued in ordaining sin and the fate of mankind, namely that objects
outside Himself were required for His attributes; as Leibniz did, by tracing
evil back to the divine understanding as its ideal cause, which the Creator
did not Himself make, and by the idea, following from this, of a best of all
possible worlds, together with his own peculiar formulation of the principle
of sufficient reason; and as more recent thinkers (from Spinoza onward) did
through a more fully developed pantheism; — rather, it is precisely in order,
with Augustine, to emphasize unrestricted freedom of will and the
unmeasured being of God that he, on p. 64 and following, on Ezekiel 33:11,
draws the distinction: "But why some are struck by the law and others not,
why some accept and others despise the grace offered, is another question,
and is not dealt with here by him, Ezekiel, who speaks of the grace that God
causes to be preached and offers to all, and not of the secret, holy will of
God, which orders, creates, and does all things through His counsel — which
and how many He wills to make partakers and co-sharers of the grace
offered and proclaimed. This secret will is not to be searched into but
worshipped with fear and trembling, as a deep, holy secret of the high
Majesty, which He has reserved to Himself alone —. Insofar as God now
hides Himself and does not wish to be known by us here, we ought not to
trouble ourselves about it —. So we must let God, in His majesty and
nature, in His secret will, remain unsearched —. God does not grieve over
the death of the sinner, which He Himself works, but grieves over the
misery and death which He finds in man, and would gladly take it away."
(How precisely the purely speculative-principial element is here separated
from the applied, in keeping with what we noted above concerning Luther's
manner and way of considering things!) — "But God, as He is hidden in
His majesty, does not grieve, does not take death away, but works death,
life, all in all. For there God has not bound Himself in the Word, but hovers
free over all things." One hears how he, certainly with justice, in order to
extol the will of grace and election as independent of all creatures and
conditioned only in God Himself, through the foreordaining of the
believing recognition of His Word, is thereby revealed —

*) Note. Even though the defenders of the so-called Reformed doctrine of
the election of grace, earlier or later, generally assumed a decretum Dei
liberum, their other assertions all too often contradicted this. One may see,
among many other examples, how Spinozistic, for instance, Franz Burmann
— known through his commentaries — expresses himself in his Synopsis
theologiae I, 25: "Objectum omnipotentiae divinae est possibile, hoc est,
quidquid Deus velle potuit, quum rerum possibilitas non sit in rebus ipsis,
sed in sola Dei voluntate; unde sequitur, respectu Dei nullam esse
contingentiam, quae juxta ac possibilitas non rerum adfectiones, sed
intellectus nostri defectus notant." ["The object of divine omnipotence is
the possible, that is, whatever God was able to will, since the possibility of
things does not lie in the things themselves but in the will of God alone;
whence it follows that, with respect to God, there is no contingency —
contingency and possibility alike marking not properties of things but
defects of our understanding."]
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