# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1892_S22
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

22 Proceedings of the fourteenth convention

especially with his holiness and righteousness, that he should condemn a man who obeyed his will and did what he was supposed to do. So the persistently unbelieving man must, according to God's antecedent will, have been meant to believe and, because he did not obey God in this but thrust faith from him, or suffered shipwreck of it again, he is lost. And so God's judgment is now, without any exception, in accord with his consequent will and with divine righteousness and holiness."

But as little as it is to be traced back to a decree of God that those who are lost do not come to faith in Christ but die in unbelief, so little is this to be traced back to an omission on God's part by which faith would have been made impossible for anyone. For all the good that we enjoy in time, God's Word traces back to God and eternity; but the evil that befalls us, not so; rather it leaves it with man and in time. Thus it says, for example, in that passage: "Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world" (that is, from eternity); but of the others it says: "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." This is not traced back to eternity, nor to God, but it is the devil's wages that awaits those who are lost.

As the temporal cause why those who come to faith die in faith and are saved, come to faith and persevere in it, God's grace, power and might working in them in time was stated above; if we ask for the eternal cause, then according to Scripture it is the *Gnadenwahl* [election of grace] resting on God's universal counsel to save all human beings through Christ. For, it says, Acts 13:48: "When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord, and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed." Rom. 8:29: "Whom he did foreknow, he also predestinated . . . , and whom he predestinated, them he also called." This calling, which as can be seen from what follows is effective, includes faith. And Eph. 1:4, 5: "According as he has chosen us in him (Christ) before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love, having predestinated us (the elect) unto the adoption of children to himself by Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace," etc. Those, then, who are elected are elected to sonship and therefore, since one becomes a child of God only through faith, also to faith. The faith of the elect thus flows from the election as an eternal counsel of God.

From this, now, that the faith of the elect flows from election, our opponents in the doctrine of election infer that it accordingly