# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S80
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

that being is posited together with the willing and knowing of God Himself, and therefore makes an absolute limit equal to His own impossible; — evil first came essentially into existence, which all good has had from eternity, in that it

had united itself with corruption — merely so as not to lose the living omnipresence of God in the domain of spiritual life, without having to place the causation of sin in Him — [some have said] that evil is simply nothing but a defectus, a gap in the self-movement of the will, which, because it lies beyond the proper measure, cannot as a "Not" fall within the divine consciousness either: with this a contradiction is thereby constituted, from which one could help oneself only through dualistic conceptions, because one would necessarily be driven to the dilemma of either after all tracing back the ultimate ground of the privation of that natural property, and thus the origin of evil, to God Himself once again, or else regarding His creating not as pure act but as bound up, in a passive way, with a necessity holding sway alongside Him. Scripture directs us back, away from all such abstractions, to more concrete determinations, in that it explains the actual nature and origin of sin both through a not-advancing to the higher stage which is the fulfillment of the concept of humanity, and also, above all, leads us to the presupposition of another element, contrary to God, which has taken the empty place of what was missed by Him. It [sin] is that which, over against the exclusive right of the good, has its existence only through the presumption of the creature. The chief of the evil spirits, the prince of the world, sought, full of envy, to make this latter [existence] dependent on his person alone (cf. Matt. 4:9), as an enemy of the Son of God, to whom he ought to have been subject, and who especially wished to glorify Himself in the human race, in which He took His delight — sought to corrupt it and to frustrate the purposes of divine love. He wished to create something of his own, and this became the kingdom of darkness, the impenetrable mystery within the circle of created things. Beyond the original decision for evil there is no other condition than the will of the Creator Himself — the existence of personal creatures in their clinging to their eternal origin, which was meant to become the free self-affirmation of the self. An innate neutrality between fellowship with God and turning away from Him, or even an ever-abiding wavering between love of God and self-love, as is expressed in the shallow "eleutherian" theories of the various modified Pelagian and deistic tendencies — cf. against this Jas. 3:11 — likewise, if freedom in man is made to consist in the capacity to determine oneself, according to grounds of reason, independently of sensuous impulses, and if the outward neediness of the animal part of our soul, in itself wholly guiltless — (which first gains its excessive strength through the powerlessness of the spirit and disordered, unnatural thoughts, providing so irritable a substrate, so unruly an instrument, and which can nevertheless often become, for the spirit, a check upon evil in particular and outward respects) — is made the seat of sin (cf. note *, p. 47), this necessarily already includes sin itself in the creature as it came from God's hand. The narrative of Scripture, Gen. 2:16f., 3:2f., certainly and undeniably brings out that the consciousness of the prohibition — thus of a possible act which nevertheless simply ought not to have occurred — preceded the woman's decision to follow the serpent; but a beginning of its actual realization was not yet present in either of the first parents; nor was the thought of evil, given through the knowledge of that possibility, already in itself the evil thought in them; for the All-Holy One thinks and knows it most perfectly of all, and yet at the same time as something absolutely and eternally separated from Himself — in truth as a nothingness (equivalent to the Hebrew aven, the Old German bosi), which, as a non ens, cannot have been wrought by God as such, and to which objective, substantial being can never and in no case belong, because it, confined fast within the sphere of subjectivity, is always compelled, abusing and perverting, to attach itself to something existing through Him, in order, upon that as a basis, to bring its lie and its non-being — its striving to consume and reduce to nothing the being of the essence to which it clings — into appearance,