# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1857_S59
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected with It, etc.                    59

...authority, and treats the criminal as a person of age, fully accountable
and imputable, who through his free action seeks independently to set
himself against the general order. Now how much more does the Christian
doctrine speak of a future last judgment of the world, through which God,
definitively and forever, separates out and excludes everything that has
been an impure element in the course of His kingdom here on earth, and, by
virtue of His holy and righteous retribution, blots out — as a power of
darkness that, on account of guilt drawn upon itself, separates the sins
that have occurred forever from God and His blessedness — that power which
the cross of the Son of God, the revelation of divine wrath as well as of
the highest love and faithfulness, and His work of grace and reconciliation
toward those who, under divine patience, come to the light through faith.
Had evil in man not originally sprung from his own free act, it would
conflict with God's justice to impose on him the necessity of making
satisfaction to the law violated by sin, and the humiliation of the Savior
in the form of a servant, and His obedience, as well as His shameful
suffering and death upon the cross, would never have been needed; the whole
expenditure of this costly ransom for the life of the world would have been
superfluous.

The question of the freedom of the human will is, to be sure, significant
only for the realm of the ethical; if, in actions that in themselves bear no
relation to the opposition of good and evil, a self-determination makes
itself known that cannot be dissolved into mere being-determined, then it is
drawn into the inquiry solely for this reason: that the manner of this
capacity to have done otherwise, in the metaphysical sense, generally has
a necessary connection with the ethical sphere. (For how else could the
Apostle exhort: "Whether ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to
the glory of God," 1 Corinthians 10:31; likewise: "And whatsoever ye do in
word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God
and the Father by Him," Colossians 3:17. Compare the comprehensive saying:
"All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient; all
things are lawful unto me, but I will not be brought under the power of
any," 1 Corinthians 6:12; "All things are lawful for me, but all things
edify not," chapter 10:23; likewise the whole ninth chapter, further
chapter 7:31, 1 Timothy 4:4f., Philippians 4:12.) This freedom, in this
narrower, particular domain, we have lost through the fall in the sense
that moral goodness can no longer fill, with its content, the abstractly
indifferent or adiaphoristic element in our life, movement, and being; it
has, in fact, all become impure and determined by evil. Since, then, the
Gospel finds man everywhere bound only to the latter, it can, of course,
never presuppose in him a power to know and seek, of himself, the way of
peace. Just as, however, upon their lost possession the divine tidings —
of a forbidden tree, of the counter-working in Eve's waking consciousness
against the serpent's temptation, of the conceiving—