# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S77
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith etc.   77

degenerated, in that the spirit, no longer resting in agreement with itself in relation to all else above and beside it, craved after a supposed ideal that had been violently torn loose from the conditions established by the Creator. Thus, in the place of the longing for the true archetype there stepped a self-love, now free of its God-willed bounds, hostile to those very bounds and given over merely to illusory goods — a corrupted habit of taking pleasure in its own supposed perfections and preferring them above everything else; and the conscience, which was meant to be an unresisted awareness of the highest good and the guiding power for the free self, so that the self might move about that good knowingly and willingly, now took up a position that appeared to us as an evil become our own, cast in the form of a law — indeed, predominantly of an accusation against falsehood and untruth — excusing only here and there in particular cases (cf. Gen. 20:5). The imagination and striving of the heart and mind was now to undergo, in all its activities, a direction in which the curse was fulfilled that desire and self-inclination toward perversity brought upon itself — a hideous corruption and abnormal reshaping of a spirit originally constituted quite differently in its nature; and this curse gained in intensity in the same measure as, through severance from the effectively self-communicating source of all sanctifying and beatifying light, the capacity to turn to that source anew was lost. It was the first step toward sin, as a breaking off and transforming of the principle of development toward accomplished reality — a fall into immeasurable depth. The difference between the evil angels and the fallen first humans, together with the descendants begotten after their image, lies solely in the conditions of temporal and psychic life, under which the being, movement, and coming-into-being of the latter must be conceived, and which the concept of a merely intelligible being does not include; what such a being can and wills according to its innate possibility, it must also at once actually be, without the interval of such a state of succession in becoming, which hovered between approach and its appointed goal. (Cf. 1 John 3:8: "for the devil sinneth from the beginning." Augsburg Confession, Art. 19.*) Hollaz, loc. cit., de angel. qu. 25: "Nemine instigante.")

*) Note. It might seem as though the Confession contradicted itself in this article, in that it at one point removes the causality of sin from God, and yet nevertheless ascribes it to Him at the end through the words: "who, as soon as God withdrew His hand, turned himself from God to evil," etc. One should, however, compare what was noted above, at a passage entirely relevant here, from Luther's writing against Erasmus, p. 358 of the previous volume. There is to be seen in this withdrawal of the hand no divine effecting of the fall, as though the fall would then have followed with necessity from that withdrawal as its presupposition; but rather a decree that, through self-limitation, leaves the creature to its own decision and does not hinder it therefrom — a decree that could be fulfilled in no other way than by God, in His powerful concursus, which sustains, in a determining manner, whatever has come into being through Him, withholding, with respect to the innermost power of decision underlying free acts, the determining (not the sustaining) influence. The Latin text shows the sense clearly: quae non adjuvante