# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1857_S20
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

teaches concerning the scientia Dei libera, that God knows the actual in se tamquam in causa universali, as also in causis proximis et in rebus ipsis, then it considers it questionable to assume — only in the sense of the Calvinists, who separate without uniting, and who turn all creaturely freedom into a mere semblance — that He knows the futura contingentia at the same time in praedeterminatione voluntatis suae; in the sense in which Luther speaks of it, it is by no means dangerous, which is why he indeed had no need to retract anything in his exposition of Genesis, on Gen. 26:9 (vol. II, p. 482), where he says there: "Now, I have among other things written, that

-of that which has a beginning) the separating-out of the same into past, present, and future is not present at all; for, in that God is in Himself the Eternal One, He never excludes from His thinking the knowledge of the sequence of time, but rather His understanding and will encompass it and pass through it, without being in any way limited by it. From Him, who is original, there breaks forth at once, in an eternal manner, that which we, according to our mode of contemplation, call a foreknowing and a foreordaining — and this without any one of these divine actions itself preceding or following another, just as they all admit of no limitation in themselves and stand in relation to actual time and space only, as the dogmaticians say, quatenus terminantur in creaturis. It must always remain our task, amid all the trains of thought that arise from the above propositions, to keep unweakened the consciousness of the independence of God and the dependence of the finite, so that even that concerning which we can decide this way or that at will, we must at the same time think of as wholly determined by God's knowing and willing. As for evil, therefore divine providence and governance is called the permitting one, permittens, because omnipotence can never lack the means to prevent it at and in its arising, since it can only be, when it wills — (not to hinder it) —; where in particular cases it does the latter, or at least limits or directs its effects and consequences as its wise purposes require, impediens, limitans, dirigens. Cf. the image used by Luther of a good rider and his broken-down horse, or of a carpenter and a worm-eaten piece of wood, etc., p. 84 and following.) But does not the divine world-plan, and the sequence of actions and counter-actions in the course of things, nevertheless seem to be modified by free actions, in that the choice of these actions, as it settles the resolve in a person this way or that, brings forth a wholly different succession in the causal nexus, so that God's governing and providence would have to be thought of as, in some measure, dependent upon the creature? Would this not be a complete inversion of this relationship between Him and that which has its life only from and in Him? No — the freedom of that very thing itself, together with everything that proceeds from it, is through God by virtue of His prothesis and prognosis. He has resolved from eternity — for "before, in, and after time," which arose with the world, is to Him an eternal now and today — surveying an entire series of rational beings, with all the resolves and actions which they will themselves choose, and their consequences, together with all the counter-actions required on His part in order, despite and through them, to realize His purposes, to call them one day into existence; thus they are, with all the actions of their choice, dependent solely and absolutely upon the will of God, without their freedom — however it is to be conceived — being thereby abolished. One might, to be sure, object to this manner of thinking that it humanizes God too much. But just as we were created after the image of God, so Scripture in turn instructs us to form for ourselves, from the image, a conception of the archetype; God theomorphized man, who received his being — and so it is for that reason indispensable for man to anthropomorphize.