# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1857_S57
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected with It, etc.                    57

...grasped as a fullness that goes far deeper than in modern eudaemonistic views, in which one rises at most to the greatest possible well-being of the creature as the purpose of the world. But how can this revelation be brought about, without His creating beings in whom His highest perfection is realized — beings that alone are capable of reflecting it back to themselves as in a mirror, because in free love, drawing near to the archetype, they also incline themselves toward Him. If it is, then, the will of divine love to bestow outwardly the most glorious being that another existence besides God can possess, then He posits, along with it, creaturely freedom; that it should perfectly realize its own being is the proper purpose of the creation of the world. Again, since all human beings of all times are conscious, from like experience, that at one and the same time they can undertake variously more than a single thing, this wonderful capacity must either itself belong to the divine final purpose, or it may not exist at all, because by its nature it renders every other purpose wholly uncertain. — God is free; that is beyond all doubt, for the world cannot emanate from Him by necessity (unless He and it were one and the same), because this would be wholly incompatible with the unconditioned character of His being; its creation (eternal as well as temporal) depends rather on the counsel of His love and wisdom;*) He

*) Note. When Quenstedt, I, p. 423, says: "Acyrologia est dicere, mundum aliquando non fuisse; 'aliquando' enim idem est ac aliquo tempore, sed dici non potest, aliquo tempore mundum non fuisse, quum ante mundum conditum non fuerit tempus" [It is an impropriety of speech to say that the world at one time did not exist; for "at one time" means the same as "at some point in time," but it cannot be said that the world at some point in time did not exist, since before the world was founded there was no time] — cf. Luther's sermons on Genesis, part I, p. 10 — then the objections against a beginning of the world are thereby sufficiently refuted, namely those proceeding from the notion that, if there had been a time when God was not yet Creator, a transition from not-creating to creating would have been posited in God, and He would thus have been subject to change and to the succession of time. The world came to be with time; but God is its Creator from eternity, for through the will of His love He brings forth the world, in an eternal manner, in His own thinking; yet He does not will it merely as an idea immanent in Himself, but He beholds it also as really existing from eternity — though, understandably, insofar as it is released into an outward existence in time and space, it cannot, as such, for that very reason be from eternity. But it is a further question: if God, as the love that is the fundamental determination of His divine self, is such that in Him the thought of the world can only eternally be, does it not follow that both the idea and the reality of the latter follow with strict necessity from His very essence? Is there for Him no other relation in which His love could realize itself? The answer is given by the article of faith of the Gospel concerning the divine Trinity: here there is unity of essence together with distinction of the three hypostases; just as without this — without an I and a Thou — eternal love would have had to seek another object for itself, so that, apart from this, a necessary relation to a being different from God would follow. If God needed the world in order to be, according to His essence, what He is — love — then this, and His freedom, would not be the absolutely perfect. We see, moreover, from what Scripture itself puts into our hands, when it calls the being of God (self-communicating) love, that this being is determined by His will just as much as His will is determined by His being from eternity; and how He, even in Himself, cannot be the undifferentiated unity — which can never really be conceived if within it nothing is united. The concept of love requires that of freedom of the will; it is divine self-determination. But if each of the Persons in the Godhead is determined, in love, toward its object — the other two — then the eternal being must be distinguished not merely as these three Persons,

but essentially within itself. Why?