# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S37
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to the 1862 Volume. 37

doctrine of grace, so also his doctrine of the total corruption of human nature rests on an abstraction that runs counter to Scripture, experience, and psychology. That in the natural man there is a consciousness of God, a conscience, an inclination toward the true and the good, a longing for salvation — this Scripture teaches, as does experience. Whoever confesses that man cannot come to Christ by his own strength, unless the Spirit of Jesus Christ draws him, does not thereby exclude that grace attaches itself to some inclination in man,*) as it is written that whoever does the truth comes to the light (John 3:21), and Peter (3:1) charges wives to win the heathen without a word, through their conduct — which surely presupposes a receptiveness of the natural man for the moral spirit of Christianity. So here too we may expect a renewed, thorough working-through of this doctrine on the basis of Scripture and making use of the rich results which the trend of the most recent age has contributed to anthropology and psychology."**) (See Der innere Gang des deutschen Protestantismus, etc. By Dr. K. F. A. Kahnis, 2nd ed.

in him, and cannot sin, because he is born of God." 1 John 3:9. And again: "Blessed be God .., who has caused us to be born again .. to an incorruptible .. inheritance, reserved in heaven for you, who through faith are kept by the power of God unto salvation." 1 Pet. 1:3-5. Cf. Phil. 2:13. By this it is indeed unanswerably denied that the regenerate man possesses any such synergy by virtue of which he too "does his own part." What Dr. Kahnis meets here is exactly what he himself, quite rightly, holds against Calvin on the one side, now turned against him on the other. L. u. W.

*) Probably in the same way that Christ, in raising the dead Lazarus, attached himself to some inclination toward life! Col. 2:13. L. u. W.

**) In no article, accordingly, does Prof. Dr. Kahnis depart more fundamentally from the pure doctrine of the church than in that of "free will." False belief on this point is probably also the taproot of all his other deviations, indeed of the πρῶτον ψεῦδος (first falsehood) of the whole of newer theology in general. As long as this poisonous semi-Pelagian, synergistic seed is not killed, most newer theologians will have no much greater share in a revival of true theology than once an Erasmus had in the Reformation of the church. Without perfect purity in the doctrine de libero arbitrio, there can be no thought of building securely on truly Lutheran theology. Before a theology which denies the "total corruption of human nature," which does not, from the very outset and to the very close, cry to man: "Where is boasting then? It is excluded" (Rom. 3:27), the true church of believers will always shrink back, without on that account being frightened by a Calvinist doctrine of predestination that is held up to it with the other hand as a bogeyman. Every theologian must first pass through the narrow gate of the recognition of the total corruption of human nature, or else the cardinal doctrine of the justification of a poor sinner before God will, in his theological system, be a thing torn from its joints and emptied of its true meaning. Would to God the newer theologians could bring themselves to read Luther's treatise De servo arbitrio — this masterpiece of true theological speculation and scriptural interpretation — once, in a pupil's humility, without the prejudice of their own "freer and deeper spiritual insight"; then this writing would prove itself a specially powerful medicine, a true panacea against the semi-Pelagianism and synergism that has now become epidemic. L. u. W.