# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S71
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith etc.   71

It is true that truth prevails in the end, but is often suppressed; for
it must at times, like Christ, die, but yet rise again.
Luther. (XV, 2660.)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith.
(By Pastor O. Fürbringer.)

(Continued.)
Thesis V.

Just as the concept of that which I feel as my own movement of life by no means directly includes freedom within itself, so the possibility of evil is not yet essentially contained in the latter. There are many determinations within the human unity of spirit and body, above all a carrying power and unrelenting force of violent desires and passions, first given to it with sin. In contrast, Scripture and church doctrine know of a freedom which, pertaining to the inner sphere of life, belongs to man as a possession only when it is granted to him by virtue of a redemption appropriated through a willing wrought by God. It is the full decisiveness of the believer for the good and holy, according to the new man, which is given through the word: "So if the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed," John 8:31 ff.; with this is connected the "being lord" over all things, of which, after Paul, no one has spoken more forcefully and clearly than Luther. Cf. 1 Cor. 10:29, 7:22, 2 Cor. 3:17, Gal. 2:4, 5:1,13, 1 Pet. 2:16, Rom. 8:2 ff., Jas. 1:25, 2:12. (The law of liberty, to which bondage is contrary, and whose right is fulfilled in us through Jesus Christ insofar as He releases from the bondage of sin and the compulsion of the good all whom, freed from judgment before His Father in Him, are obedient to Him; for the office of the life-giving Spirit, the Gospel, which writes the kingly commandment of love upon the fleshly tables of the heart, looses from the law of sin and of death.) Matt. 7:17 ff., 12:33, 1 John 3:9. Here in the present life the evil lust that comes by virtue of the old man is still bound up with this; but in eternal glory the soul is no longer the arena of a struggle between good and evil, but all resistance of the flesh is swallowed up in a perfect victory, Rom. 8:23. This highest freedom, then, which excludes every possibility of evil, and with respect to which it has rather become a necessity, would, in a man created — as without sin, so also without this freedom — never have been conceivable at all, had it not had as its point of departure the capacity for self-determination toward the divine within him, because union with this could only be possible as something essentially unconstrained; and if the