# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S161
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Doctrine and Defense.

Volume III.   June 1857.   No. 6.

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

In Christian doctrine there is so great and exalted a coherence, and
one of such deep significance, that where the knowledge of it is
lacking, a great deal must be misunderstood and misinterpreted. One
thing yet remains to us, to which we are led as to the capstone of our
results thus far: the relationship of the human spiritual powers to the
workings of divine grace. The fall into sin was possible only in a being
in which the love of which it is capable was, in some respect bearing
on its own self, likewise mixed with imperfection and need. Where this
has no place, where out of absolute self-sufficiency nothing but
communication and condescending self-giving grows, there original
freedom toward the good which it posits is as true and reliable as the
most infallible necessity. But man remains created for love, and all
the affections of his soul (including those which first came into
actuality with sin, although in themselves they can be thought of as
pure — such as hatred, compassion, anger, sorrow, remorse, shame,
fear) are possible only because man was meant, in a godlike manner,
to be love. So it is, then, the love of his Redeemer that frees him from
the bonds into which he was cast by him who would murder all love
wherever he could, so that we are transformed into the same image
from one degree of glory to another, even as by the Lord, who is the
Spirit. The entrance into, and appropriation of, this fellowship with
Christ — who is for that very reason the way to the Father, because
He, Himself present to us in the word of truth and through it, gives
from Himself, through the Holy Spirit, the life that is properly His
own — this we have to recognize in His light.

If feeling, in the broader sense, is the becoming aware of life as such,
in pleasure or displeasure, then in man it is consciousness — as
something immediate, still distinct from that which is objective, that
is, mediated through reflection. Through the activity of the latter it
becomes spiritualized into disposition,