# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1857_S56
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

realm of nature, it discerns an eternal power, and in its own activity peculiar to itself knows itself determined through a moral consciousness which testifies to it more closely of the Godhead, and which can be grounded only in dependence upon that Godhead. The laws of nature exclude entirely the possibility of any action other than that regulated by them; so too are the vital movements within us drives of whose determining ground and determined manner of operating we have no inner intuition — although our soul, by virtue of innate ideas, remains, as a circumstance that must be presupposed, inseparable from basic drives, and yet falling under no immediate consciousness, the sole and mighty source of all such operations (compare Richter, Erkenntniss des Menschen, p. 381ff.); from the revelation of the divine will, however, for action going beyond this, man was able to tear himself loose. For that reason the moral law can no longer directly realize itself immediately within him, and it therefore appears, without discursive knowledge — which depends on the will — unlike any law of nature, at the very ground of his spirit, in order to assert itself there as such.

These are the fundamental elements of personhood, through which both the God-likeness of creaturely beings and their communion with the Creator are always conditioned. They were meant thereby to be capable of entering into a relationship with him, since he directed his good pleasure toward them, beyond his own eternal and necessary object, in such a way that it would not depend solely on his own creation and ordaining, and so that they, in the union of their self-conscious striving with the divine will, which is holy and good, might become partakers of a blessedness all the greater, the more intimate, nobler, and more excellent the relationship would be into which they were thereby placed above all unfree creatures. If this latter arrangement and mutual connection were not aimed exclusively at their having, as the basis of a natural existence for those creatures, an influence upon the possibility and the consequences of their free deeds, then the whole world, with everything in it, would in respect of him have been created by God entirely in vain. For the world, apart from personal creatures, contains nothing that could not be adequately ascribed to God as a determining cause; hence, through its existence, it acquires no relation to him other than that which it already had in the state of non-being, since its temporal development, no less than its possibility and actuality, depends absolutely and necessarily upon God alone. The idea which God has of his creative power and of what he brings forth cannot become clearer to him through the being of the finite; if what has become actual is, in every respect, determined by himself, then it is, with regard to him, a matter of indifference whether it exists or not. Rightly, however, and in accordance with Scripture, the church's dogmatic works set forth the revelation of God, of his glory and his fame (doxa Dei), of his perfection and honor, and thereby every communication of blessedness, as the ultimate end for which he called the world into being — the economy of salvation being ordered accordingly in