# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S163
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith, etc. 163

are the Word and the Sacraments. In whom, and how, does a new birth
to the kingdom of heaven take place, in such a way that, where it does
not, the divine ordinance of two so differing life-destinies commits no
wrong whatsoever against man? How highly each individual personality
among them is esteemed in God's eyes, such that He turns His love,
which seeks the lost, toward all without any selection that would stand
in contradiction to the acknowledgment of the infinite worth of a
human soul — this belongs to the deepest roots of Christianity, whose
power pervades the whole. Cf. Rom. 5:18, 2 Cor. 5:19, 1 John 2:2, 2 Pet.
3:9, Ezek. 33:11, Matt. 18:14, Luke 15:7, 19:10, with Rom. 14:15, 1 Cor.
8:11. Just as in God Three are yet One — His hidden and His revealed
will, His antecedent and His consequent will, etc. — form the circle of
an infinity which, as an affirmative return into itself, in turn cancels the
negation and re-establishes identity with itself: so here too the two
points — that God alone effects the possession and preservation of
salvation, and yet the unbeliever dies guilty of eternal death — are only
two distinguished moments of a single truth that is in agreement with
itself. The holding together and firm retention of human freedom and
of divine creating and ordering is of the highest importance with regard
to redemption — just as within it the light of the Godhead specifically
divides itself into three flames which flow together into one as the
primal ground of finite multiplicity; just as through the Incarnation of
the Son infinite power and earthly weakness, and in the Sacraments
heavenly good and natural substance, are united; and just as the
doctrine of the church joins the visible and temporal with the invisible
and eternal. It is precisely by this that biblical dogma, in its connection
with the mystery of godliness (1 Tim. 3:16), is itself a mystery: that at
its foundation it exhibits an unresolved two-sidedness which purely
scientific speculation, the deeper it penetrates, can only push further
back, but can never bring to a conclusion; through it, wherever
opposing determinations negate one another, there results everywhere
only an endless progression, the contemplation of which drives one
beyond the sphere of one's own thinking into the domain of faith;
because the one is mutually excluded by the other and remains subject
to the mutability and short-sighted limits of the creaturely
understanding, the true content is never discovered, but rather its
unity is a fiction of the subject.

The inability, through apostasy, to withdraw oneself beyond rescue
from the working of God's grace is established in man through his
conscience — unless one has hardened oneself against it as the devil
has. The Holy Spirit, communicating Himself to them through the
evangelical proclamation of salvation and through holy Baptism —
whose sign has been set within the Word and has thereby become a
partaker of its power — is from that point active, [reaching] the center
of individual spiritual life, the heart, the personal self with its love and
with