# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1857_S58
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

He, however, created man after Himself, so that this personhood, especially
as the eye and heart of the world, should be an image of His own; thus the
concept of freedom holds equally, whether predicated of Him or of man.

How, indeed, could there be talk of any right of the worldly authority to
hold evildoers accountable, without the admission of the freedom of the
human will? All imputation is abolished, every concept of guilt and
punishment — whether of civil or of moral law — is altered, indeed
nullified, and the voice of conscience itself becomes a deception, if the
acknowledgment of sin as grounded in human causality is not allowed to
hold —; so intimately has this truth grown into the roots of social life.
No legislature whatsoever can determine the will to which it gives commands
in the manner of natural necessity, so as to realize itself immediately; it
must tolerate that will's resistance; but only thereby does it assert its
sanctioned majesty, that in the face of transgressions it realizes itself
indirectly through punishment. Chastisement, which serves for improvement,
has its purpose wholly and entirely in the individual pupil, whose conduct
still preserves for him the standing and right of a child; punishment as
such represents the authority of a will of sanctioned

The activities of the one acting power in God do not first arise in relation to the
world, for then He would have to obtain, through His working, something out of Himself
which He would have to take up into Himself as an integrating element for His completion;
rather, they are inherent in Him in an eternal manner through the relations of the
hypostases to one another. According to the concept, indeed, the indeterminate and
abstractly simple being — the negation of the predicates — is distinct from the capacity to
determine itself absolutely, just as the finite spirit distinguishes within itself the pure I from
that which is filled with positive content, whereby its concretion is mediated. In the concept
of a person there lies, then, both the notion of nature (James 3:7), which subsists
personally through and in something individually distinct, and that of selfhood [Ichheit]
itself, the pure form of existence — cf. Baier, Compendium theologiae positivae, Leipzig
1726, p. 218; according to the latter, it designates the center-point of self-consciousness.
In the sentence "I am conscious of myself," "I" is the subject, the person; "myself" is the
object, the nature, the substance endowed with natural qualities; the power to will, to
know, to feel, is quite distinct from the I in itself, in which all this is concentrated. So then,
in the depth of the Absolute — from which, for the first, we think away all positings — there
are, from eternity (which for the divine being is in an utterly perfect manner what time is
for ours), three willing and self-conscious subjects, without our being permitted to speak of
three natures, three wills, three concrete self-consciousnesses, but indeed of three I's, in
whom one being, one will, one concentration of real activities has a threefold subsistence
and is to be conceived under a threefold relation. (Cf. the Athanasian Creed: "And yet
they are not three Almighties, but one Almighty," etc. And Athanasius himself, in his
second oration against the Arians, teaches concerning the begetting that it occurs not out
of [conscious] willing, but according to the essence — and yet not without the former — in
unfreedom; cf. Luther, vol. XIX, p. 93. Conversely, in Christ the God-man, two natures are
united into the unity of a person taken in a formal, not a material, sense.) And these
various relations within the infinite being — which are indeed essential, yet are most
precisely connected with the personal distinctions, and thus grant us the idea of an eternal
livingness and blessedness in God — these are what constitute the necessary
presupposition for the divinely free bringing-forth of a world of the finite.