# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1882_S14
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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should. His synergistic theory demanded most decidedly that those whom God has elected and saves, whereas God has not elected and does not save others, must have done something that the latter have not done, and on account of which the former must have been chosen by God unto salvation in preference to the latter. That one man was indeed not elected but rejected by God solely through his own fault, namely on account of his foreseen stiff-necked resistance, but that the other was chosen unto salvation only by grace and not on account of his better conduct — this he could not only by no means reconcile with his reason, but it also so utterly contradicted the synergistic views that lived in his soul that he could do no other: he had to oppose the old-Lutheran doctrine of election that had become audible, or give up his synergistic ideas. But in order to make an impression on his public he had to brand the old-Lutheran doctrine of election with the mark of Calvinism, indeed of Crypto-Calvinism. He saw that he would accomplish not the least if he tried to refute the old-Lutheran doctrine from Scripture alone; but since Calvinism is rightly abhorred in the Lutheran church, he hoped to win a great following if he fastened the name of that abominable heresy on the old-Lutheran doctrine that had come back onto the field. That his synergism now lodged in the hearts of countless people who suppose themselves to be good Lutherans, he knew: so he rang, as he himself says in the first number of his "Altes und Neues," his "storm bell" with joyful certainty of victory; in which, alas, he has indeed not been mistaken. The immense chorus of all synergists "runs to him in heaps, like water" (Ps. 73:10), and is zealous with him "for God, but not according to knowledge" (Rom. 10:2), or — God alone knows who and how many — in conscious opposition to the Word of the living God and to the clear testimony of His true church.

As early as May 1879 Prof. Schmidt sent to a member of the faculty of our seminary at St. Louis four theses together with as many antitheses, which were intended "to state briefly and concisely the points which he objected to in our Western Report (of 1877)." Already in these theses he rejects, among other things, this as our doctrine: that "the election did not take place in consequence of God's foreknowledge of the different conduct of men toward the divine grace offered." In the antithesis set against this thesis he rejected, however, he himself lays down: "The special will of grace of God, as the nearest ground and norm of election in the narrowest sense, does indeed have the different conduct of men toward the general grace as its presupposition." (See "Altes und Neues" I, 234 f., where the theses and antitheses are printed.) What