# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1892_S26
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

26 Proceedings of the fourteenth convention

As a result of the corruption of original sin, therefore, human beings who are by nature without faith cannot make themselves believers, cannot of themselves accept the grace offered in the Word, and so neither can those who are lost.

Yet this inability excuses no one. That a person cannot believe, God in his Word reckons to him for damnation, that is, as guilt. Rom. 8:7, 8 says: "For the carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God; neither indeed can it be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God." It is not correct here to say: Man is obligated to nothing more than he is able to perform; rather it says here: *Ultra posse homo obligatur* [man is obligated beyond what he is able to do], that is, man is obligated to more than he can perform. That he lies in the corruption of original sin, that he is by nature in unbelief, that on account of original sin he constantly resists the drawing of God's grace, is his guilt, despite his inability to desist from it of himself and come to faith. Therefore all human beings are by nature children of wrath and punishable. Guilty are already the newborn children, guilty are the unbelievers respectable in the world's eyes, like the most abject; guilty are those who have heard the Gospel and do not believe, guilty also are those who have never heard it. When Scripture says that human beings by wanton actual sins heap up wrath on the day of judgment, the guilt of the so-called respectable world is thereby not denied; rather the relation is this: some have guilt, others have greater guilt. Likewise, when it is said that the servant who knows his master's will and has not done it must suffer double stripes, it is said at the same time that the servant who does not know it and has done what deserves stripes must also suffer stripes; so both are guilty, those who have heard the Gospel and do not believe, and those who have not heard the Gospel. Guilt does not begin only when someone has heard the Gospel. Rather, unbelief then merely shows itself most clearly; indeed, the more God works on a person, the more stubbornly he resists, the more his unbelief unfolds (as the example of Pharaoh shows), the greater also becomes the guilt. But because unbelief is also in those who have not heard the Gospel, they too are guilty, damnable. If someone hears God's Word and does not believe, he is a stranger and outside the commonwealth of Israel, he is a stranger from the covenants of promise, he has no hope and is without God in the world; so it is precisely with the heathen who have not heard God's Word, for the apostle said it of such. The unbelief that becomes manifest in the preaching of the Gospel is nothing new, nothing that would only then have arisen, no new sin that would come forth in place of the old sins and condemn man, but