# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1857_S193
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume III.   July 1857.   No. 7.

On the doctrine of the election of grace and some materials connected with it.
(By Pastor O. Fürbringer.)

(Conclusion.)

Semipelagianism, according to which man is able to prepare himself for the grace that encourages and furthers a natural capacity to believe and to cooperate, by means of the higher powers essential to him (the liberum arbitrium, that is, intellectus et voluntas), which have been weakened since the loss of an original righteousness that was not created in him but only added to him — and according to which the desire that is thereby robbed of its golden bridle and withdraws itself from the dominion of those powers is not properly sin, but rather the tinder of sin (compare the Apology, p. 107 f., Latin p. 52); and Synergism, which ascribes to the will, at the moment when it is laid hold of by preparatory or prevenient grace, by its natural constitution not only the power of repulsion but also that of yielding assent or consenting: these are soul-endangering heresies, because they extend the remaining spiritual powers so far that they bring a good work of man toward God in addition to God's gift of faith in that man's soul, and thus flatly contradict Ephesians 2:8 ff.*) No less

*) Note. Faith and work stand over against each other in Christian doctrine according to their psychological development, although faith is nothing other than the germ which already bears the fruit within itself. Faith is also a work; see Luther's Sermon on Good Works, 1520 (vol. XVII, p. 394); Preface to the Epistle to the Romans (vol. XII, p. 58) — the seed planted in the heart by God; that the seed comes up is effected, together with the spiritual power that has become proper to creaturely knowing and willing, by the assistance from above. Faith does not justify as a work, as a divine operation of grace, for then it could just as well be said of love, which is the heavenly life of faith as hatred is the ungodly life of mistrust; nor does it do so as the root of the Christian virtues that follow from it, for that indeed it is insofar as it is the former; and therefore works, virtue, and love are not added to faith, but faith shows itself in them as its own unfoldings. In such a relation, however, it is only the earthly, God-wrought, transitory form, whereas love is rather the essential, eternally abiding element; compare 2 Corinthians 5:7 with 1 Corinthians 13:8. Faith justifies insofar as it is the sole possibility of accepting, of seizing the prize by force, Matthew 11:12. — For the

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