# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1892_S13
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1892. 13

also in the undeveloped form of the unconscious inclination is not merely aberration and misstep but something that requires atonement, because it is crime and transgression. For it is always a breach of the divine law, because the divine *nomos* is 'spiritual,' Rom. 7:14, and as such demands not only the holy deed but also the holy heart filled with pure love of God. As an express *dictum probans* [proof text] for the doctrine in question, namely that already the innate habit of sin establishes guilt before the divine court, Eph. 2:3 has, as is well known, always been regarded. After the apostle has described how the Gentile Christians in their former unchristian state had fallen prey to death in sins and trespasses and to the power of the prince of darkness, he states that the Jewish Christians too, before their conversion, had walked among the children of unbelief in the lusts of their flesh and had done the will of the flesh and of their unholy thoughts, and then adds, 'and were by nature (φύσει) children of wrath, even as the others' ... Now if we ask what the apostle understands by φύσει in our passage, whether the innate state itself or the natural and necessary development of the innate state, the context must give the answer. Everything here depends on determining the contrast in which the φύσει is to be thought of as standing. It cannot stand in contrast to what the children of wrath have become through mercy, through grace, according to vv. 4 ff. For in the converted one a distinction can well be made between what he is by nature (φύσει) and what he is by grace (χάριτι); but not in the unconverted one; he is simply a child of wrath, not merely in one respect. ... There remains, then, in the case of φύσει the contrast to sinful doing, which had just been described in the words 'in which also we,' etc., so that the apostle ascends *ab effectu ad causam* [from effect to cause] and φύσει is used not in a limiting but in an intensifying sense. But then it is also clear that φύσει, precisely in contrast to actual sin, can refer only to the sinfulness posited with birth itself, and so must be equal to γενέσει [by birth], so that we have to recognize here an immediate *dictum probans* for the subjection to wrath, posited with birth itself, of the human race." So far Philippi.

Another principal proof passage for the point that original sin already subjected human beings to God's sentence of damnation is Rom. 5:12: "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death has passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." This passage says not only that sin came upon all human beings in a mediate way, through Adam, and therefore also temporal and eternal death, but it says even that this came in an immediate way,