# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S81
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith etc.   81

that which opposes it, not in antithesis, that is, in fact, of a personality equally free and conditioned, which did not merely allow it some influence upon itself, but rather, precisely because it first arose out of and within it, made itself evil, and thus became the principle of evil — and indeed, because it is a person, one that seduces (itself as well as) others. This is the ground of the total hardening and hopelessness of any redemption for the devils.

(To be continued.)

On the Distinction between the Essential and the Non-Essential in Doctrine.

A very common comfort with which many nowadays console themselves for their deviations from the doctrine of Scripture, or, as they prefer to say, of the Church, is

to bring [it] into appearance. Now this, then, is what is properly foreign to the creature, which is of divine lineage, and into which alone it can indeed penetrate; thus the delusion of an unbridled freedom, freed and released from every bond of its origin, is the utmost height reached by the disgrace of one fettered by sin — a disgrace we grasp most vividly in its dark depth and dreadful groundlessness the more uncanny the transition out of a pure state into it becomes. Objectively, the devil, like the first man, had to be ignorant of it in the first moment and the beginnings of their temporal life (which, in the case of a child born of Adam, is possible only before the awakening of consciousness about itself, of the law and its conflict with the self, and with the conscience wholly benumbed, Rom. 7:7;) from this innocence they were meant to rise, through the fully conscious rejection of evil, subjectively to a "knowing no sin" (2 Cor. 5:21 — cf. Winer's Grammar of New Testament Greek Idiom, p. 396ff.). As soon as the will, in a quiescent way, allowed its hitherto unstained mechanism to unite itself with the thought of the forbidden object, the disposition, the germ, was present, out of which the former's resolve at once furthered the now enclosed seed toward blossom and fruit — wherein lies the concept of godlessness, of that which has become detached from God, because it remains untouched by His activity, although He had, in that sense, cooperated in its inner genesis, inasmuch as the acting of the powers in themselves cannot be conceived without His pervading movement. All the outcomes of these decisions, both outward and inward, outside the point of subjectivity, nonetheless remain no less perfectly in His hand; they become punishments, just as He wills it; (the loss of the divine image, the dominion of concupiscentia, the impossibility of undoing the decision made for Satan's mind and will and of turning again toward likeness to God, are, in their ultimate ground, to be considered under this point of view — see the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, p. 121f., Latin p. 58f. — as is likewise the divine working to which Scripture ascribes a provoking, indeed a hardening, toward evil: 2 Sam. 24:1, 1 Chron. 22:1, 2 Sam. 16:10f., 12:11, 1 Kings 22:20ff., Isa. 63:17, etc.;) and though it often seems as if the history of this life were a dualism of divine and creaturely activity, with the greatest abnormalities and most dreadful excesses on the latter's part: nevertheless, even before the time of harvest, evil can never attain to a self-sufficient kingdom asserting itself on its own, cf. Gen. 50:19f., however unceasingly it strives after this; it is possible only within an intelligible world, one that goes beyond the form of mere spontaneity, and where the inner states of a being were accessible to their own mutual constraint, insofar as several of them, opposed to one another, met together in one and the same being, and what was meant to be a mere moment set itself up as the highest principle and wished to be the whole — it remains nothing but a futile struggle of facts against the idea of the divine purposes.