# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1863_S297
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on a New Apology for the Reformed Church. 297

"original sin is only an outward hindrance to the good spiritual powers,
and not a robbing and lack of them — as when
a magnet is smeared with garlic juice, whereby its natural power
is not taken away, but only hindered."

Now it is indeed true that the final test of whether an account of
the doctrine of the Gospel contains a Pelagian or semi-Pelagian leaven
is to be sought in the account given of the doctrine of the election of
grace. Experience testifies, alas, that many teachers, in setting forth
their doctrine, avoid the Pelagian errors and get safely past them for
only so long — until they set about to treat the doctrine of the election
of grace, or predestination. Here it becomes only too often manifest
that among those very people who suppose themselves able to subscribe,
word for word, to the confession the Formula of Concord makes concerning
original sin and the free will, there are some found who are by no means
yet healed of all Pelagian notions. These are, namely, all those
who believe and teach that, just as the stubborn unbelief of many which
God foresaw is the cause of God's having resolved from eternity
to reject and damn them, so also the steadfast faith, continuing to
the end, of a certain number of men, which God foresaw, is the cause
that God elected them to salvation from eternity. But whoever teaches
so plainly sets forth steadfast faith not as a pure gift of grace from God,
but as an achievement of man, which was the outward
moving cause for God to prefer a certain number of men to others
and to choose them out for salvation. For if faith is a
gift of God's free grace, then this faith cannot first have
moved God to elect a man. Faith thus becomes
a kind of merit of men; the election ceases to be an election of free
grace, and becomes one grounded on human merit and on one person's
being better than another, and the ultimate ground of man's salvation
is then placed not in God's eternal free mercy in Christ,
but in man himself — in his willing, in his accepting, in his
consenting, in his faithfulness and constancy — in short, taken out of God's hands
and laid in man's hands. Did our Concordienformel
[Formula of Concord] and the theologians of our Church who faithfully follow it teach
this, then Mr. Licentiate Krummacher would indeed not without justice charge our Church
that, despite its otherwise pure confession of original sin and free
will, it is nevertheless "infected with a Roman Catholic semi-Pelagianism."
But, God be praised and thanked for it forever! our glorious concluding
confession stands even this test as well. Our precious Formula of Concord has
not, as later theologians within our Church did, let itself be driven
by Calvinistic determinism to the other extreme, even the subtlest
semi-Pelagianism. For while it denies that God,
as the Calvinists say, the greatest number of men according to his