# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1857_S196
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

196 On the doctrine of the election of grace and some materials connected with it, etc.

willing that belongs to the creature, and to the holiness of its Creator, who by no means works evil as evil, since with Him foreknowledge could not deceive and universal working could not be idle. When, on the other hand, foreseeing the end of the one party in unbelief, in order not to make their judgment heavier,

thought, save a man? Just as empty words are no help actually extended, so a pretended faith is not the true and genuine faith, but differs from it as a dead sound differs from a living hand. (vv. 15-17.) One better instructed will rather say, in defense of the right concept: Well, you have faith, and I have works; show me, if you can, your faith without your works — (the correct reading, not according to the textus receptus: out of or with your works) — which will of course be just as impossible as wanting to show an animated body when the soul has departed from it —; and I will show you my living faith out of my active working. You believe that the God who is Father, Son, and Spirit is one — that the devils themselves feel, understand, and remember, but they also tremble at it because of the fearful expectation of eternal torments. But will you know, O man, who occupy yourself with nothing but empty boasting, that faith without works is a dead body? Then just mark this: was not Abraham our father justified out of that which is something active — (the apostle calls it "works," that is, he sets metonymically the effect in place of the cause, as we indeed often do in the language of everyday life, because no hypocrite and no carnally secure man understands the inner divine power that underlies the works of faith; and, adapting himself to such a man's capacity, he mentions, for his conviction, that which is more easily grasped by him — just as I can speak of a counterfeit faith only in this way: if you are a believer, then you must do good; and everything that is customary in the law belongs here — and he also presupposes in his very concept something by which the work is wrought, although that alone possesses the ability to constrain oneself, but not the inner impulse toward good works) — justified, I say, when he laid his son upon the altar in full earnestness of obedience? Do you see that faith was active in him and cooperated, when Abraham and his works were at work, because his works could not proceed from an unbelieving but only from a believing mind, and out of the works it became the true, perfect faith? (That is, without them it is a delusion, an appearance without substance, just as it is also made stronger by the demonstration, and its life is heightened and raised by the labor.) And the Scripture was fulfilled which says: Abraham believed God, and He (namely God, according to the Hebrew of Genesis 15:6; whence the Jews translate: he, Abraham, reckoned it to Him, to God, for righteousness, that is, accounted it as grace, gratefully acknowledged it as such; the Romanists: he, Abraham, reckoned it to himself for righteousness, whereby he earned the reward of the promise; the Greek verb in James, as in the LXX, stands impersonally: it was reckoned to him, etc.; compare Romans 4:3) — He reckoned it to him for righteousness; for the readiness to sacrifice was, so to speak, nothing but working faith, as in the case of Phinehas, of whose deed Psalm 106:31 says the like — yet not in respect of the work; rather, it was as though he saw or heard nothing else for faith, for the ardor of love and of zeal to rescue the honor of his God. For through faith God becomes, as Luther says, an objectum amabile; faith is, as it were, sheer work and working, and the work sheer faith; and Abraham was called the friend of God. Thus a man is justified out of something active, out of a living power, and not out of a mere empty abstraction (which is called faith by the same right by which a portrait is called the living person it represents), which is what faith without works is — although faith justifies not insofar as it is active by its nature, but insofar as it believes in the blessing of all nations, which has procured for the recipient a righteousness that is God's, given to him by Him and valid before Him. (vv. 18 ff.) With reverence and simplicity, without aversion and without twisting the words, the teaching of the first witnesses of Jesus Christ is to be received as having come from Him and from His Spirit; for it is one and the same truth which they all, in a manner befitting their high calling,