# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1857_S18
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

18 On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Certain Matters Connected Therewith, etc.

-posits, God's simple fundamental essence and everything else is thereby posited as well. The standpoint is, to be sure, a different one from which one proceeds when one derives foreknowledge from the predetermination willed in the eternal counsel, and a reprehensible abomination when one goes on further to blasphemous and wholly one-sided conclusions; to the word of biblical revelation, which condescends to human capacity, it is far more fitting to proceed conversely (abstracting the knowing from the willing), with the Lutheran dogmaticians — especially after the time when the opposite doctrinal type, sunk into heresy, had been developed and established to more general currency — linking predestination to prescience, and conditioning the former by the latter; but the boundary of all such anthropopathies remains the necessary unitas et simplicitas essentiae divinae, which, being likewise upheld by Scripture, excludes any true opposition within the operative primal power itself, as Quenstedt rightly remarks: "Aliud est, quod in Deo actu et realiter unum est, concipere tamquam actu et realiter multa, qui conceptus omnino falsus esset; et aliud, quod in Deo unum est, sive quae simplicissimus Dei actus eminentissima ratione simplicissime complectitur, concipere tamquam virtute et per eminentiam multa, qui conceptus non falsus est, sed inadaequatus." From this last standpoint of true speculation, which guards against all emptiness of distinctions when they would mark out different and separate domains within the being of God — a standpoint which the Reformer himself indicates when, in his Gospel sermon for the 24th Sunday after Trinity, he says: "For He does not — thus measure things one after another, one before, the other after, as we must do in this life, but grasps everything in a single instant, the beginning, middle, and end of the whole human race and of all time" — (vol. XIV, p. 418,) — that standpoint is to be understood as underlying just as much the distinguishing of the hidden and the revealed will of God (voluntas beneplaciti et signi), namely according to his exposition of Genesis 6:5 (vol. I, p. 494), as it is much else that stands opposed to a rigoristic doctrine of election; in that God has included in His eternal counsel, in a manner beyond time, that which He beholds as coming to pass in the future, because, were He to prevent it, it could not happen: so, with regard to this inner unity of God — which stands specifically higher than that of finite being, but by no means in the sense of the Socinians — Luther could boldly assert in his book On the Bondage of the Will (p. 88): "Now if there had been in Pharaoh a shiftable freedom of the free will, which might have turned to one side or the other" (namely, without being at the same time willed by God), "then God could not have foretold Pharaoh's hardening with such certainty. Now God, who cannot fail nor lie, foretells it; therefore it must of necessity and certainty come to pass in the future that he would be hardened. But this would not be so certain, were the hardening not wholly and entirely outside of our powers" (considered by themselves) "and solely in God's power and hand," (in that nothing can hap-