# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1857_S197
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected with It, etc. 197

...has withdrawn the means of grace from them in greater or lesser measure, may we on that account charge God in the least with unrighteousness? How many examples from the Scripture of the Old Testament teach us that even the common report of a coetus in which the one true God was known and worshiped was sufficient to lead men to faith and salvation! Compare in the New Testament particularly 1 Thessalonians 1:8. Wandalinus, hypotyp., p. 145: "Quo non pervenit pes Apostolorum, penetravit sonus." Rightly, moreover, does the old and venerable König say, with regard to questions that raise doubts, theol. posit. § 441: "Stante benevola Dei voluntate de salvandis per fidem in Christum omnibus, stante catholico Christi merito eidemque innixa intercessione mediatoria pro omnibus omnino hominibus, esse tamen quaedam in mediorum salutis dispensatione inter aequales saepe inaequalia, arcano ac impervestigabili Dei judicio committenda, Rom. 11:33." To be sure, the obstinacy of the spiritually dead can never be stronger than the working power of Him who first gives life to all; least of all in one who has been driven by the law to the knowledge of his impotence and neediness — wherein it certainly lay in God's intention to make it easier for him not to lay hold of a resistance deliberately and wantonly nourished and sunk in malice. God, however, will not have His noble spiritual creature in man degraded into a mechanical matter — therefore His grace is not irresistible, as His power well might be; it awakens, it draws, it looses, it restores, not with the necessity of nature, but in accordance with the powers created in man, which receive the impulse and the very existence of their own inclination toward God through the motion supernaturally imparted by Him, so that the act of assent is an essential consequence of a receiving of prevenient grace that conducts itself passively under the divine working. The kingdom of God came near also to the Pharisees, Luke 11:20; but they despised God's counsel against themselves, chapter 7:30; although the Lord would have gathered them too under His wings...

...manner befitting their high calling; it is one and the same faith of which the discussion turns here as in other places of the apostolic writings, only that James presents it as sheer working (a mighty, busy thing within us, of which it is impossible that it should not be doing without ceasing, see Luther's Preface to the Epistle to the Romans, vol. XII, p. 58; a divine light and life in the heart, see the Apology at the place cited) — because this is in fact all that justifying faith is, while the dead faith had to be rejected by him as wholly unfit for justification. From his standpoint — compare Luther's Church Postil, 11th Sunday after Trinity, vol. VIV, p. 232 — are also to be judged many of the Lutheran theologians of the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, who already in some measure betrayed, by their style of writing and their edifying gift of preaching, a spirit differing from that of many opponents among their contemporaries. And in our own day again this man or that, forsaken by the broad learning of the orthodox, contends with lust for battle against the devil of the Union, without really being willing to learn what the man after whom they name themselves taught concerning the Gospel, the means of grace, etc. In humility and in the recognition of all human piecework, our godly forefathers always boasted of their visible communion, which they called a particular church, only this: that its confession was the purest here on earth in comparison with the rest.