# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S72
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

Adam's will had been fulfilled on a more perfect level with the true content of his spirit, then the abolition of the capacity to do otherwise, in relation to the moral antithesis — the estrangement from God and within himself — would inevitably have taken place. From this it follows at once, with all necessity, that although divine and creaturely freedom are not, with respect to the subject of which they are predicated, specifically different from one another — cf. J. Gerhard, loc. cit., §10 — nevertheless a capacity to will evil as well is eternally excluded from God, because He posits the good perfectly in Himself in an original and self-grounded way, and possesses it as His own unconditioned essence, not as something given. He can will nothing else from eternity than what He Himself has determined within Himself; otherwise a being independent of Him would still have to exist; wherefore He also, in the actions that concern the facts of His revelations, is determined by no absolute necessity. Only that is evil which is against His revealed will; therefore only creatures can become evil — creatures whom He made good, but so made that they decide for themselves out of free inclination for what is given to them, or withhold their will from doing so. (Determined goodness is incapable of a conscious self-determination toward the good, and thus incapable of the enjoyment of a union of love with the infinite source that had set these finite spirits into existence, and which can be grounded only in moral freedom, because it consists in this: that the one regards the ultimate ends of the other spirit — here, of God Himself — as his own, without further intent, purely for the other's sake. In the essentially distinct innate drives, the possibility of an abuse through freedom was established, which can therefore no more occur as a fall in God than contradictory determinations are conceivable in His will. —) Thus, even where it is the nature of certain forms and relations of the power of will first to bring about being free, it does not follow that the possibility of deciding for evil belongs to all such forms as well.

What actually constitutes the concept of the original measure of creaturely freedom — the will's own remaining-with-itself so as to determine itself otherwise in relation to the moral, than its innate disposition would have brought with it — is what we must deal with here first. The essence and nature of this, according to its potency, was undisputedly good before the fall in man (as in the devil), Gen. 1:31; the difference from the divine — on which, to be sure, everything here depends — lies, on closer examination, exclusively in this: that in God there is indeed both a (grounded in His freedom, yet) necessary willing, which in ourselves we call drive and desire, without thereby also introducing the concept of neediness, as well as a formally free willing that can be begun, continued, or left undone, of which only the power and complete possibility, not the act itself, as in the former case, must be assumed by us to continue constantly; but that the divine will itself is mediated only through itself —