# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1857_S22
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

whether, and to what extent, there is freedom, and whether it belongs to creatures as well, or may be denied them.

God, according to the primal ground of His being, is the highest freedom of will, the unlimited power of conscious self-determination — cf. Luther, vol. XIX, p. 14 and following; necessity, in whatever way it may occur, when made the absolutely first thing, is incompatible with the pure concept of the Absolute; nor can the content of the divine self-consciousness — the infinite totality, simply sufficient unto itself — so to speak, precede His will; for then His being would be, for Himself, something given. The cosmological proof drives us beyond the whole domain of causes, which are always themselves in turn also effects, to the acknowledgment of the all-conditioning primal being, which is its own cause. But how can this eternal self-production of God be possible otherwise than through a (free) willing, which precisely thereby knows of itself? Unconscious drives are not this, and presuppose an originally passive condition, a being-determined by something else, something more perfect; the forms or ideas of the possible, too, and the laws of thought, are grounded in the absolute self-determination of God; that His being is the pure harmony and eternal order which they reveal and reflect in the sphere of that which exists in time and space rests not upon a necessity governing Him Himself, but upon His fundamental freedom. If being and willing in God, the origin of all essence, are not identical, then there is something independent outside His will, God is not the sole ground of Himself, there is in Him a becoming, in which being still has, at some point, a not-being attached to it; a passing over from one state into another, a real succession of time — even though the latter be conceived as infinite, as of boundless extent — falls within Him. (Compare, against this, John 8:58. 2 Peter 3:8. Ideal time, as well as the space possible for the creature before its coming into being, are simply our inadequate conceptions of eternity and immeasurability, which we cannot have otherwise.) God is ens a se ipso, talis est, qualem esse se voluit, sui origo suaeque causa substantiae; wherefore aseitas, autousia are ascribed to Him by the church teachers. The primal being, in its innermost ground, is self-determining intelligence, that is, absolute personality, a being existing in itself and distinguishing itself from the world.

Necessity is not able to bring forth the free from itself, but always only the necessary; freedom, according to its concept, has everything within itself — it can posit something different from itself, an infallible necessity, and it can at the same time posit a freedom outside itself. The primal willing of God is an infinite fullness of being within Him; He wills simply life and love (Psalm 80:6. 1 John 4:16); He can therefore become the object of the full, undivided devotion of personalities formed after Himself, and of their unhesitating confidence.