# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1857_S54
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

54 On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected with It, etc.

Church and office not from faith, but through a nova lex. The latter is Romanist, the former Luther's testimony, which breathes through all his writings. Compare the Apology, German edition, p. 247, Latin p. 148: "And we are not speaking of an imaginary church that is to be found nowhere, but we say and truly know that this church, in which saints live, truly exists on earth and remains — namely, that some are children of God here and there throughout the whole world, in all kinds of kingdoms, islands, lands, and cities, from the rising of the sun to its setting, who have rightly known Christ and the Gospel; and we say that this same church has the outward marks, the preaching office or Gospel, and the Sacraments." (From these closing words it is also evident what Melanchthon, in the fifth article of the Confession, intended to express as the basis of the fourteenth.)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected with It.

(By Pastor O. Fürbringer.)

(Continued.)

This moment in the concept of personhood, consciousness, loses however all its significance without that of self-determination, insofar as self-determination stands purely opposed to being determined by an objective power. Already in the very fact that I know myself as a person and set myself over against its basis — the body and the outer world, insofar as this comprises the sphere of mutual determining and being determined — I accomplish an act that breaks off all natural causality, is at all times independent of it, and thus, in fact, although in itself a merely theoretical knowledge, already involves the capacity for self-determination. And if we look more closely and more sharply, we must say: it is out of his willing that a person first becomes conscious of himself; through this willing he goes forth from himself, externalizes his inwardness, and collides with that which determines him. If self-consciousness, then, is the withdrawing of oneself from the Other, self-determination is rather a counter-acting activity, by which the I seeks to possess itself in that Other. The inner boundary here is the ethical Ought, which by no means, as in the realm of nature (by whose laws our physical life is upheld and sustained, without our being able to know of them except mediately, through reflection), determines the manifestation of force to a necessarily given outcome; but rather appears as a sensation implanted in us of our dependence on a higher Being, and of what we owe to Him, to ourselves, and to His creatures — a dependence which, by its very nature and origin, was the mediating bond of an already actual communion between man, made in God's image, and God. (For Adam bore the law of conscience within himself in such a way that he not only knew the true and the good but also willed it; for him it was no Ought.) Because