This continues from Part 15 (Table of Contents in Part 3), a series presenting an English translation of Pastor Christian Hochstetter's 1885 496-page book entitled (abbreviated) The History of the Missouri Synod, 1838-1884. It also follows an Excursus on a "sharp polemic" of Walther against one of his bitterest opponents. — The doctrine at issue in this chapter is called in German "Gnadenwahl" which translates properly into "Election of Grace". It is only "a consolatory article" of faith (FC, Ep 11, 1). Unfortunately this term is usually shortened in translation to just "Election" or "Predestination" and so it loses the all important qualifier "Grace". (The dispute in America is sometimes referred to as the "Predestinarian Controversy".)
But I was glad to see that Dr. Fred Kramer translated the term properly as… "Election of Grace" in his translation, and so I would honor him on this. Those who lose their way on this doctrine are essentially going astray on just what divine "Grace" really means. But not the Old Missouri Synod. — Two fruitful readings to accompany this chapter would be: (1) the 2018 CPH book Walther's Works: Predestination, which contains the translation of the two excellent Pastoral Conferences of 1880 and 1881 (German texts here & here) discussed in Hochstetter, and (2) Franz Pieper's masterful 1913 book Conversion and Election, A Plea (Hathi, German: Zur Einigung).357: Walther to F. A. Schmidt: “Well then, you want war, you shall have war”
358: Schmidt: “May the Colossus of the Missouri Synod break into a thousand pieces.”
359: "Calvinist error also dominates the whole of pantheistic philosophy of all times."
360: "Modern Christianity is designed to make people think that they are great saints."
361: "God has not only chosen for salvation, but also for the whole Christian life."
362: "Schmidt and his followers attack… the confession of our Church"
362: "also the faith of man cannot be the cause of God's election"
363: "Faith is not a cause of election but the consequence of it"
365: "the formula intuitu fidei not only unclearly indicates the relationship of faith to the election of grace, but that it even allows, and even has already experienced, an interpretation that is harmful to the doctrine of free will."
367: Did Walther teach "in view of faith" (intuitu fidei)?: "Anyone who says so is lying."
370: "perversion… if we are accused… of excluding faith,… disregarding… salvation through faith alone."
374: "Faith is not to be introduced here as the cause; …My faith does not make me certain of this"
375: "A judge is just… This would lead to the result that it would no longer be an election of grace".
377: Stellhorn's error on Election of Grace: "some people do not notice the deception"
378: God: "I did not pass you by, … The fault is yours that you are going to hell."
379: "It is an election of grace for us in our salvation.… revealed…in the Holy Scriptures, not a trial."
381: "man's self-decision instead of divine grace"
382: "the elect remain elect, even during a temporary apostasy, as David's example shows"
383: "an election made 'in view of faith'… must fall out on the side of the semi-Pelagian Arminians,"
383: "Calvin's doctrine is based much more on an election of wrath than on a election of grace"
383: "We Lutherans do not know such ready-made saints."
385: Christ "is the book of life,… There is no book of death"
385-6: "abominable Calvinists… teach that the order of salvation is for the pious… children of God alone!"
393: Luther: "This predestination of God is a cause for many to stand fast, for no one a cause to fall."
394: “Allwardt: 'I do not know whether I am chosen in the strict sense!'… what kind of faith … rests on uncertainty?… the Roman Catholic doctrine of doubt… nobody can be sure whether he will be saved!”
398: "they want… passive behavior a property of the natural man… prepare himself on his conversion"
401: Walther: "We do not want to give man a share in his salvation, but give glory to God alone."
401: "the accusation of Calvinism… was intended to … justification to their synergism"
403: Ohio: "that man converts… by the grace of God alone is a completely unreasonable doctrine."
405: "In this matter, then, the crown of all doctrines must be at last preserved, the doctrine of justification"
407: Stoeckhardt: "no glory for our opponents that today's mediating German theology…approves of them"
409: Walther: "the high article of the Election of Grace, which is so incomprehensible to reason"
Images of some men appearing in Chapter 12: (353-409)
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| Schmidt ——— Stellhorn ——— Tressel ——— Schwan —— O. Fuerbringer —— Allwardt —— Lehmann —— Brobst |
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| G. Fritschel ——— Sihler —— E.A.W. Krauss —— Philippi —— A.L. Graebner — Stoeckhardt —— Pieper —— R. Lange |
The following is an English translation of C. Hochstetter's Geschichte… by BackToLuther utilizing the DeepL Translator with minor assistance from Dr. Fred Kramer's translation. All hyperlinks, highlighting and red text in square brackets [] are mine. All internal hyperlinks are active in this embedded window, external links should be opened in a new tab or window.
Walther's masterful handling of opponents as weak Christians during discussions (see p. 365-366) calls for a further personal testimony from a CHIQ article in 1931. This will be presented in the next "Excursus" and will be compared to a misjudgment against Walther by a Fort Wayne seminary professor. — After the break below, an example of a well-known Calvinist author/preacher of today, then the customary fine print version of the above chapter. — In the next Part 17, Chapter 13a.
The distinct teaching of Calvinism is brought into focus in this chapter 12, and is harshly condemned (see p. 383 & 385). Today Calvinism is quite well known in America among even preachers who are considered conservative and strong defenders of Biblical authority. They have been considered to be among what are termed "Fundamentalists", at least in part. One example of a well-known Calvinist author is the long time pastor of The Moody Church in Chicago, Dr. Erwin Lutzer [Tyndale pic]. In his 2002 book Who Are You to Judge? Learning to Distinguish Between Truths, Half-Truths, and Lies, 2002, he states (p. 71):
"I hold to many of the convictions of what is popularly called Calvinism, with its emphasis on God's sovereignty and predestination; others are more akin to Arminianism, with its emphasis on free will. But these should not be the matters over which we divide, nor should they define heresy."
Dr. Lutzer leaves no room for Lutheranism and the Scriptural doctrine of the Election of Grace. He holds that there is also an Election to Damnation, ostensibly because of God's Sovereignty. This may make sense to our reason, but it is not according to Holy Scripture. He can claim to be Scriptural, but the Holy Scriptures themselves decide who is Scriptural… and who is not.
The History of the Missouri Synod, 1838-1884, Chapter 12
By Christian Hochstetter
= = = = = = = = =
The outbreak and course of the Election of Grace Controversy. [F.A. Schmidt begins his battle (354); Schwan calls for General Pastoral Conference, 1880 (365)] The first General Pastoral Conference in Chicago (365). The Thirteen Theses as the sum of the Election of Grace doctrine (386) [Luther’s letter of 1545 on Predestination (391); Error on Conversion (396); ]). The second General Pastoral Conference at Fort Wayne (399). The Real Point of Contention – Conversion (403).
1879—1881.
“In the Lutheran Church itself, there will have to be a hard struggle if the truth is to remain.” This word, which was spoken at the Jubilee Synod in 1872, was, as we have already noted in the previous chapter, like a prophecy which was to be fulfilled in the controversy about the doctrine of the Election of Grace, which broke out seven years later, in 1879, and which troubled the Church, the outbreak and course of which we will try to describe in the following.
Since the large number of synod members had made it necessary to set up district synods, and since the general synod, which until then had met every three years, had to meet as a delegate synod from 1875 onwards,
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the second delegate synod was held in St. Louis in 1878. It was part of the task of these delegates to elect two professors, one theological and one English teacher for the theological Concordia Seminary in St. Louis on behalf of the Synod. Each delegate was free to propose for these posts whom he considered suitable, but it was also asked whether the person proposed was in every respect qualified for such an important office. As soon as a justified objection was raised, it was customary to refrain from the person proposed. So it happened that the names of the Professors F. A. Schmidt and W. Stellhorn, as well as those of the Pastors P. Eirich and G. Stöckhardt, who was still in Saxony at that time, were mentioned, but also dropped. [↑] The first three left the Synod soon after. Prof. F. A. Schmidt, at that time in Madison, Wisc., already belonged to the Norwegian Synod, but in the meantime he has become the bitterest enemy of the Missouri Synod. Dr. Walther writes in the February issue of Lehre und Wehre of the year 1884 [p. 56]: “It was only out of consideration for our dear Norwegian sister Synod that F. A. Schmidt was not elected professor in St. Louis. But it was very important for him to be elected, because under May 7, 1878, Prof. Schmidt wrote to the District President S. W., who was a member of the electoral college, on a postcard which is still in his hands today, among other things literally the following: “L. W. As I was in W. near Str. I heard that I was being considered for the vacant English professorship or even the other one in systematic theology, and whereas Pastor Koren *) will probably do everything in his power to thwart my calling, I wanted to inform you that Pastor Tressel informs me in letters received yesterday that the committee of the Ohio Synod will (under certain circumstances) recommend me for Columbus, a call I could hardly refuse. For my part, I do not wish that the Missourians would have tender consideration for the Norwegians,
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*) President of the Iowa District of the Norwegian Lutheran Synod.
and then I have to go to Columbus after all. — A few days later the Delegate Synod was held and Prof. Schmidt was disappointed in his expectations. When he at that time showed himself willing to accept a professorship in the Missouri Synod, he had demonstrably long since read the Western Synodical Report of 1877, but at that time he did not yet protest against this Synodical Report with a single word; only afterwards, when he had been able to convince himself of the merits of his position through Prof. Schmidt's work, he was able to make a decision. It was only afterwards, when he felt insulted by Professor Walther in particular (for Schmidt attributed his non-election to him, as the following shows), that he set about attacking the doctrine of the election by grace contained in that report as a Calvinistic, even crypto-Calvinistic doctrine. On January 2, 1879, Prof. Schmidt wrote to Dr. Walther: “I can no longer go along with… this, I must no longer be silent…”, among other things. Dr. Walther, did not answer this until February 8, whereupon Prof. Schmidt wrote: “Your silence, however, has done me great harm, not because I thought I had first received a testimonium heterodoxiae (testimony of an erring faith) on the same — for I received this sufficiently at the Delegate Synod.” Not being elected professor had done it to him. Since now the long-time president of the Central District, Pastor H. C. Schwan, a nephew of Pastor F. Wyneken, who died in 1875 in San Francisco, had been elected General President of the Missouri Synod (after Dr. Walther had resigned this synod office because of overburdening), Prof Schmidt also exchanged letters with Pastor Schwan and threatened already on July 7th of the same year to possibly (if things stayed like this) go public with an explanation of his dissent. *) Within the Synodical Conference, of which Prof. Schmidt was also a member at that time, it was expressly
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*) At that time President Schwan invited Schmidt and his brother-in-law Allwardt to visit the old District President O. Fuerbringer for the purpose of a colloquium; but Schmidt refused to travel to Pastor Fuerbringer, whose thorough erudition and independence is known to everyone.
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agreed that the Conference was to control any disagreements that might break out; the members of the Conference should therefore take the proper course with their respective concerns, but should not open a public polemic (in publications) against each other. Prof. F. A. Schmidt, however, who believed he had been slighted by the Missouri Synod, was not afraid of causing a schism in the Church, and therefore he began a public fight against the Missouri Synod, as if it had become a Calvinist sect! So in January 1880 he published his theological periodical, called Old and New [Altes und Neues], and already in the No. 1 issue he declared that he had to sound the alarm, that it was an open, determined fight he intended against this new crypto-Calvinism. Although these attacks were mainly directed against Dr. Walther, Walther abstained from any personal polemic during the whole following year, in order not to be blamed for this annoying dispute and the threat of a church split. Only that he and his colleagues objectively tried to present the Scriptural and confessional correctness of Missouri's doctrine of the Election of Grace and to correct and adjust any careless and misleading expressions that appeared in Missouri's publications. But from Missouri it was appealed to the then President of the Synodical Conference, Prof. Lehmann in Columbus, Ohio, with the request that he should call together an extra meeting of the Synodical Conference for the purpose of looking at the doctrinal dissent that had come to light, discussing it fraternally, and thus removed with God's help. Unfortunately, Prof. Lehmann declared himself incompetent to such a measure at that time, that it was not within his area of responsibility. As soon as Prof. Lehmann had died on December 1, 1880, the then Vice President, Prof. Larsen, ordered a public colloquium between the theological faculties within the Synodical Conference. This was opened in Milwaukee on January 5, 1881. It was agreed to discuss the doctrine of the Election of Grace based on the Holy Scriptures and placed Romans 8:28 and Ephesians 1:3-6 as the
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basis for the discussion. On the fifth day, the representatives of the Ohio Synod declared that they could not stay any longer due to certain circumstances. Since a final agreement was not reached at this colloquium, it was suggested that a later colloquium be held over the year, but in the meantime both sides should abstain from publishing articles about the dispute. Prof. Schmidt explained that he could not agree to this, because he was commanded by God to lead this dispute. Thus, finally, the Missourian side declared to him: “Well then, you want war, you shall have war.” After Dr. Walther had calmly accepted for a whole year all denouncements and blasphemies of the opponents, had treated the disputed doctrine only objectively, exegetically and historically, and had again made the offer that the opponent should only give up his personal attacks (while this offer was rejected with the declaration that the war that had been started must be continued by God's command), then that word that Dr. Walther gave as answer was an act of pure self-defense. From his position in the Norwegian Synod, in which he is still functioning as a professor, Schmidt carried the Election Controversy into the Missouri Synod; three of his brothers-in-law and a number of malcontent pastors who were not blood related, took his side. Whoever wanted to could now vent his rage [Mütlein kühlen] on those whom he had long since looked at with aversion. It could hardly be expected other than that the trial which now dawned for the Lutherans within the Synodical Conference would reveal the thoughts of many hearts. “It is no wonder,” Dr. Walther wrote in his Illumination of Stellhorn’s Treatise [Beleuchtung des Stellhorns'chen Tractats, 1881; German & English “Preface”], “that now so many pastors, but also some laymen, even whole synods, read with joy everything that is written against Missouri. Secretly, even in the Synodical Conference, many were already enemies of our synod; but the situation was such that they had to duck if they did not want to make themselves suspicious; but now that a dispute has arisen in which our Synod is accused of false doctrines, it is thought that the time has finally
come in which one can decently shake off the tiresome yoke without suspicion, and even take the credit for being a courageous fighter for the pure, unadulterated truth even in the face of Missouri; then one can sing: We live a life of liberty! One hoped to get rid of Missouri soon, Schmidt had already declared in his opposition paper: “May the Colossus of the Missouri Synod break into a thousand pieces!”
The Missourians were previously accused of having put forward an absolute and blind doctrine of predestination in the most recent synodical reports from the Western District, and an essay on the doctrine of the Election of Grace, which reproduced the doctrine of the Synod of Dort, had already been published twelve years ago in Lehre und Wehre [Großberger 1873?]. The latter essay came from the midst of an Eastern conference, and was taken up by the St. Louis editorial committee, while Prof. Schmidt himself was a member of that committee. However, since it contained passages that were misleading, such as that “grace overcomes even the most wanton quarrelling and defending against it”, these passages have already been corrected twice by the author and replaced by words that are almost taken from the Formula of Concord. However, no Missourian has ever dreamed of teaching that God does not want all men to be saved, but has predestined a number of them to damnation, that Christ did not die for all and every man, that God's calling is not a serious one for all men, that God does not want to bring all men to faith and keep them in faith until the end; that God has, after he has chosen a few men, passed the others by, and the cause of it is not their wanton reluctance, impenitence and unbelief until the end, but God's mere pleasure! But this is the teaching of the Synod of Dort people, who are counted among the resolute Calvinists, a teaching which Missouri abhors, rejects, condemns and curses with all its heart as a blasphemous one. With grave
injustice they were called the Missouri Synod of Dort; rather, the Altenburg Synodical Report contains no less than nineteen pages in which those Calvinist teachings are refuted. Among other things it says: The Lutheran Church rejects the doctrine “that God does not want everyone to be saved, but condemns their sins without looking at them, and that they cannot be saved simply because of God's counsel, purpose and will,” but teaches that “they themselves are guilty that they heard the Word, not in order to learn it, but only to despise it, to blaspheme and revile it, and that they have opposed the Holy Spirit, who wanted to work in them through the Word,”; she also teaches that “such contempt of the Word is not the cause of God's providence (vel praescientia vel praedestinatio), but of man's perverse will.” These doctrines are supported by many proofs and testimonies in the Altenburg Synodical Report. There it is also shown from numerous passages and from Calvin's own words that one sees from his doctrine what is in the heart of the natural man, for by nature we too think as Calvin did. His doctrine was a devilish logic, the product of an unenlightened reason that dwells in us, just as Adam and Eve wanted to lay the guilt of their sin on God. Calvinist error also dominates the whole of pantheistic philosophy of all times.
But if such a clear and explicit rejection of the Calvinist doctrine can already be found in those Western District synodical reports, how is it that the reader here would like to ask that the Missouri Synod is nevertheless accused of Calvinism? The Western District had already for many years dealt with the topic at their conventions: Only through the teaching of the Lutheran Church God alone is given all glory! Now that this sentence had been proven by the most necessary doctrines, namely by the Word of God, by the holy sacraments, by redemption, etc., it was finally time for the doctrine of the Election of Grace.
From this it was taught in 1877 that we have to owe our Election, on the basis of the Holy Scriptures, to the mercy of God alone, according to Rom. 9:15-16. It also follows from Ephes. 1:3-6: “Anyone who thinks that election consists in the fact that when a person converts, it is only now that the good Lord chooses him, is greatly in error.” — — “The whole of modern Christianity is designed to make people think that they are great saints, and that they are better than other people, and therefore also go to heaven. On the other hand, we will have no cause there to praise ourselves — —, but all the elect and all the angels of heaven will have only God's grace to praise. It is all, all grace, that, brethren, must be our guiding star, so that we do not take away the glory of our dear God.” — And this is also here already in the exposition of Eph. 1:4 emphasized that God has graciously looked upon us, who are by nature an abomination and something to be abhorred! before his eyes, in his Son. We are not, then, freely chosen by an arbitrary election, but, as the apostle expressly states, in Christ. Although p. 25 of the Synodical Report does not actually mention Calvin's opposite doctrine, it does say: “It should also be noted that the apostle expressly says that we are chosen in Christ; hence it is godless doctrine to say that our election was first made by God in eternity, and only then, so to speak, was He able to make his Son carry out His counsel. Conversely, Christ is the eternal reason, and because, and to speak humanly, after God the Father wanted to give His dear Son for the lost world of sinners, therefore and only then, without ceasing to be God, could He choose all those who would believe in this His Son to the end. From Rom. 8:29-30 it is also clear that God did not simply choose us to go to heaven; “Let no one say ‘O, I am chosen; may I live as I wish, I will go to heaven;’ for by the fact that a
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man lives godlessly, he proves that the good God was compelled to count him among the rejected. — God has not only chosen for salvation, but also for the whole Christian life. No one goes to heaven but the one whom God leads into heaven by this way; but that we go this way is not our merit, but God's free grace. From Rom. 8:29 it follows that the way that God's grace goes with the chosen ones also includes the cross and tribulation.” From Rom. 8:29 it follows that everything that the dear God wants to do for the poor sinner is included in the Election of Grace. The first link in the chain of our salvation is the election (which He has made [or foreknew] beforehand, that is, which He has recognized or chosen out of love as His own, as Joh. 15:16 [sic? not John 10:13?] and Acts 2:23 say), the second link is the decree, the third is the call, the fourth is justification and the fifth is glorification, which alone takes place in heaven above. —
Such is the main content of the condemned Synodical Report, all Theses of which are taken literally from the Formula of Concord. Thesis III, for example, reads: "The Lutheran Church teaches that it is false and unjust to teach that not only the mercy of God and the most holy merit of Christ, but also in us is a cause of God's election, for which God has chosen us to eternal life.” In the explanation of these words it says, among other things, p. 51: “God has foreseen nothing, nothing at all in those whom he has decided to save, what would be worthy of salvation, and even if He admitted that He had foreseen something good in them, this could nevertheless not have moved Him to choose them for this reason; for all good in man comes only from Him, as Scripture teaches.” These words, which are under Thesis III, were already used by Professor Schmidt in the No. 1 issue of his opposition paper as proof that the synodical report contained “soul-dangerous
Cryptocalvinism”, that was the leaven against which one had to protest vigorously!! Whoever compares these attacked words with Thesis III, which is taken from the Formula of Concord, will find that they contain the same thing. According to the Latin text it says: it is false and unjust to pretend that even something within us is a cause of election, and in even stronger words any cause that would be within us is rejected in the summary of the Formula of Concord, in the Epitome. — From this it is already clear that Schmidt and his followers attack not only the doctrine of the Missouri Synod, but rather the confession of our Church of the only cause of the election of the children of God; if one asks what, according to the teaching of our present opponents, is to be the decisive reason and therefore the cause of election, it is said in some people that faith which endures to the end precedes election, in others that faithful conduct is the cause of election to salvation. In Old and New II, p 7 it is said that faith is the “moving cause of election” to God. Our Formula of Concord rejects the claim that something in us is the cause, and yet faith is something in us! Our opponents cannot refer to the Lutheran symbols, so much the more they prefer to refer to the dogmatists, who since Aegidius Hunnius are accustomed to teach that the election was made in view of faith (intuitu fidei). Whoever does not teach this sentence with the others, takes up the cause of the Calvinists! (See in Chapter XI [p. 345]: The latest doctrinal position of the Ohio Synod). Since under Thesis III, according to which nothing in us is a cause of God's election, (Ephesians 1:5-6, Romans 9:15, 1 Corinthians 4:7), a) the work or sanctification of man, b) man's right use of the means of grace, c) man's self-decision, d) man's desire and prayer, e) man's unwillingness to resist — was rejected, the Western Synodical Report accordingly followed with point, f) also the faith of man cannot be the cause of God's election, which rests in His heart. While Lutherans have always taught that while
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the cause of rejection is in man, for God has seen in those who are condemned their stubborn reluctance, impenitence and unbelief unto death, the cause of salvation in the elect is quite different.This is why J. Gerhard responds to the Calvinists' objection that if the cause of rejection is in man, then without doubt the cause of election will also be in man (a Calvinist conclusion of reason that our opponents also make from their point of view which they call “one and the same rule”) by saying “Unbelief and impenitence unto death, by which men are rejected by God, are deserving, actual causes of that rejection and condemnation; they arise from the fault of our corrupt nature and from the impulse of the devil; there are none of the works of the Father, none of the Son, none of the Holy Spirit. But the saving conversion to God and the faith by which we share in the merit of Christ for eternal life ....are not meritorious causes of either election or eternal salvation, nor do they arise from the forces of free will, but are the work of God,” — If faith is God's gift, then, “it is not a cause of God's love but the consequence of it, and therefore faith is not a cause of election but the consequence of it. Therefore, no matter how much good God foresees in the chosen ones, this good cannot be the reason why God saves them, for God gives it to them first” (He must first give the Holy Spirit so that the chosen ones will believe the Word through His grace!). “This is why the Holy Scriptures do not teach anywhere that we become saved because of faith, but through faith by grace! To be saved through faith means nothing other than to be saved by grace. In the other case, faith would be nothing more than an achievement, or a work which, strangely enough, should be considered before God, rather than all other works. God calls to us: “Come to the wedding,” all is ready! It is also God who puts the
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wedding dress on us, He has foreseen that He will put it on us, He has given us faith. God has put faith in the decree of election; faith belongs in the golden chain which God has forged, so to speak, with which he draws me from hell and from earth to heaven. The first, so to speak, is that he has chosen me; the second, that he has created me; the third, that he has redeemed me; the fourth, that he has brought me to faith; the fifth, that he is sustaining me; the sixth, that he is introducing me to eternal life. Here belong all the passages that testify that faith is not our work. Col. 2:12; John 6:44-45; Hebr. 12:2; 1 Cor. 12:3; 1 Peter 1:5: “Who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” God wants to keep us for salvation by faith. He has locked faith into the chain as a link from eternity; no one is elect who does not come to faith. But the Hand of eternal love has planted in a man that he comes to faith; it has not grown on the ground of his heart. Phil. 1:6. He must make a beginning, a continuation and an end, or we are all lost. Although J. Gerhard, Quenstedt and others use the expression that God has chosen us in view of faith, they nevertheless keep themselves in a way that makes them very different from our opponents, for Gerhard writes: “We do not say that predestination has its cause in the foreseeing of faith, but that view (Ansehung) of faith is part of the counsel of election.” He himself adds: “There is a great difference between these two sentences.” The latter only refers to order. Quenstedt also writes: “Faith is a part of the order established by God in election.” *). (See the Western Synodical Report p. 84.)
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*) In the May 1872 issue of Lehre und Wehre, Dr. Walther's answer appeared against G. Fritschel,
[↑] Under date of Sept. 5, 1880, while at the Canadian District Synod in Stonebridge, Can., the General President H. C. Schwan arranged a special general pastoral conference to Chicago, Illinois, noting that nothing had been done by the Synodical Conference to resolve the doctrinal controversy that had broken out over the doctrine of the Election of Grace (see above), he said that there was nothing left for the Missouri Synod to do but to seek to restore doctrinal purity within its own boundaries, so he took responsibility for this step and hoped that no member of the Missouri Synod ministry would be left behind from this conference unless he was held back by extreme hardship at home. About 500 Missouri pastors rushed to this conference, which was opened on September 29, 1880, in the church of Pastor A. Wagner's congregation. — From the exactly recorded
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who had attacked the Missouri Synod in Brobst’s Monatsheften because they had declared, albeit with explicit calling on the faithful theologians of the 17th century, that one could, strictly speaking, not talk like that: God has elected in view of faith (intuitu fidei). Besides, the Synod approved the axiom: “God has chosen only those who believe, but not because they believe”, but that the [Missouri] Synod took issue to one of the dogmatists' doctrinal statements, the expression “in view of faith” is an unfortunate terminology, G. Fritschel exclaimed under the mask of pious horror: “What a gross insult against the Lutheran Church, what a disgrace!” Against this Dr. Walther responds among other things as follows: “One is seized with melancholy that a man who so far placed the peculiarity of his [Iowa] Synod, that it strives for progress in doctrine, immediately declares it an indelible shame, which rests on us by rejecting not the doctrine but the terminology (the presentation) of the dogmatists of the 17th century in a single point as inappropriate and strictly speaking as confirming a false doctrine, which these theologians themselves abhor. What kind of party anger must this be that can enter such a polemic?” Secondly, Dr. Walther proves that the members of the Missouri Synod were by no means the first to say that the formula intuitu fidei not only unclearly indicates the relationship of faith to the election of grace, but that it even allows, and even has already experienced, an interpretation that is harmful to the doctrine of free will. Dr. Walther proves this
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proceedings, which appeared in print in St. Louis, [translated into English in Walther’s Works: Predestination, CPH 2018, p. 49 ff.] we report first of all that also there the formula intuitu fidei, i.e. the election had happened in consideration or in view of faith, was discussed. — Against the conclusion of reason, which Prof. Stellhorn made: if God rejected in view of unbelief (which nobody denies), he must have chosen in view of faith — Prof. Walther asserted that the latter did not follow at all. “One must start out from the correct statement, which is also placed in the center of our Formula of Concord, namely that man can do nothing for his salvation, but everything for his damnation. It follows already from the actual fundamental claims of proof and from other rightly understood doctrinal articles that God saw nothing good in man when He chose him, because after sin there is nothing good in man, no principle by which He can
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with an essay by Musaeus, in which he writes, the excellent Dr. Aeg. Hunnius (who came up with this formula) was made to feel scruples not only by Calvinists but also by a number of our own theologians, because they saw that if faith were the cause of the conclusion of predestination, it must also hold within itself a dignity and goodness that would make God move from eternity. Against this Hunnius had thus declared that faith was the instrumental cause of the decree [Ratschlusses] of predestination; Musaeus, however, thinks that this phrase is also somewhat harsh, and that there is also a difference between the taking of Christ's merit (by which the believer is justified) and the decree of predestination, which is an act of God in God. “This is why quite a few theologians have not wanted to call faith in Christ a cause of the decree of predestination,” to which Dr Walther remarks: “These were evidently 'Missourians' who were already haunting the old theologians at the time.” — Finally, Walther deplores Pastor Brobst, who gives himself up as the tool of such an attacker, because he uses the monthly Monats-Hefte as a rampart against the Missourian castle. — This whole article of Walther, along with the notes on p. 139, was published during the St. Louis Jubilee Synod, when Prof. F. A. Schmidt was in St. Louis. Schmidt also read it to Pastor Brobst in St. Louis, and asked him: “How does that suit you?” Prof. Schmidt recounts with joy afterwards that Brobst had answered: “I want to improve.” That was how Prof. Schmidt stood at that time. Who has changed his point of view now, him or Dr. Walther?
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work the good, — but He foresaw everything in him that damnation can work, because man is exceedingly active for evil. Because this is so, the old dogmatists had to constantly defend themselves against synergism. When someone hears the sentence: Elected in view of faith, rejected in view of unbelief, he will surely think: as in man is the power to unbelief, so also the power for faith! Finally, Pastor Rohe, who was on the side of the opposition, said that he could not harmonize the present doctrine (according to which the formula intuitu fidei should be omitted) with the earlier doctrine of the Missouri Synod. In the first two volumes of Lehre und Wehre, contrary statements from the pen of Dr Sihler and Pastor Fürbringer had appeared. Pastor Mees, for his part, read out several sentences from these essays, from which it is clear that the opponents cannot make much capital for their doctrine from these articles, but because that formula was intuitu fidei used there, Dr. Walther explained: “One can see from this fact that in those days we still tolerated the second form of doctrine (of the later dogmatists) among ourselves.”
Professor Craemer: “But not anymore.”
Dr. Walther: “With the fact that I said ‘We tolerated that at that time’, I do not want to say: ‘But not anymore’, but: that was not really the voice of the Synod, but the private voice of Dr. Sihler and Pastor Fuerbringer. It was not my own voice, the one who is the editor, appointed by the Synod as such, and also a teacher of dogmatics. I have never taught like this. Anyone who says so is lying. *)
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*) Although the students of Dr. Walther (with the exception of his opponents: F. A. Schmidt, Stellhorn and von Rohr) testify that when he came to the Election of Grace in dogmatics, he used to tell his students: “In
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While some simple-minded people were seduced by the pretence of the opponents that, in their teaching, faith comes first (namely, before what they call election, while election, as Allwardt says, is the seal of persistent faith and accordingly, can only occur when the end of faith — salvation — has already been attained, which would not be a predestination == praedestinatio, but a post-destination — postdestinatio), but according to the Calvinist-Missourian doctrine faith follows and is thus made to stink, we are, before the proceedings of the Chicago Conference are reported further, quoting from Dr. Walther's Illumination of Stellhorn’s Treatise. First of all, Stellhorn's fame, as if he had all the faithful theologians on his side, is refuted there already with only one quote from M. Chemnitz's Handbook [Handbüchlein], which was one of the bases for the writing of the Formula of Concord: “So also the election of God does not follow our faith and righteousness, but rather everything goes before it as a cause of it all, because those whom He has predestinated or elected,
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this locus, place the dogmatists aside, for they teach about it in a contradictory way, and adhere strictly to the Formula of Concord!” — so one continues on Ohio’s side nevertheless to chastise Dr. Walther of falsehood, because he is, for example, in conflict with Konrad Dietrich, for example, and still teaches that election is that action of God in which He according to the purpose of His will, solely from His grace and mercy in Christ has decided to save those who will continue to believe in Christ to the praise of the glory of His grace. — The subordinate sentence “who will continue to believe in Christ” does not in any way indicate the cause of the election, but is only a description of the elect. One has looked up the old, not yet printed sermon manuscripts of Dr. Walther, but nowhere and never the formula “In view of faith” has been found or heard. Where in the world can one find a phrase of the Formula of Concord that justified the accusation as if it placed the cause of election in the faith of man and not merely in God's mercy through Christ? — “The Formula of Concord claims that those who persevere in faith are elected, but not that a man is elected because he perseveres in faith, even as the pious are saved, but not because they are pious.”
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He has also called and justified them, Rom. 8.” [Rom. 8:30] This passage, which was also held out to him and Pastor Allwardt at the conference because it is based on God's Word, Rom. 8, Stellhorn was well aware of! — Dr. Walther then proves to him, also on p. 20 ff., that the latter stated a manifest falsehood, as if the Calvinists had said exactly the same thing on this point as those in St. Louis now claim.
Dr. Walther writes about this in his Illumination of Stellhorn's Treatise S. 18 ff [Predestination, p. 213]: “If the Calvinists rejected election in view of faith, they did so only because “they teach an absolute election.” For they teach that God created and elected a number of people for salvation out of sheer arbitrariness, the other portion also for damnation out of sheer arbitrariness … … As for those created and chosen for damnation, God decreed to leave them in their perdition, not to have mercy on them, and to pass them by, not to let them be redeemed, not to call them earnestly, not to offer them faith nor to give them faith, not to offer them the grace of conversion efficaciously, but to cast them out to hell without any mercy, for the revelation of his strict righteousness, for the sake of their unbelief and their sin, from which, however, He did not want to save them. We reject and condemn this Calvinist doctrine as blasphemous from the bottom of our hearts and, on the contrary, teach with all seriousness that God has loved all men from eternity… (See the Thirteen Theses below) …and that, therefore, all those who are not chosen are not chosen and are eternally lost, only for the sake of their wanton and obstinate opposition. But at the same time we also believe that those who are chosen are not chosen for the sake of their foreseen faith or for the sake of any good thing that God would have foreseen in them, but solely because of His
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mercy and for the sake of Christ's merit acquired by all men. We believe, teach and confess that God did not, as the Calvinists say, first choose them unconditionally and absolutely for salvation and then decided behind them to give them faith as a means of attaining salvation, but that God chose them at the same time for all that 'so that', as our confession speaks, 'our salvation and what belongs to it creates, works, helps and promotes', thus, of course, also and above all, for faith; as the Formula of Concord expressly says when it says p. 705 edition of Müller, pp. 478-479 of the St. Louis edition, quotes the Scripture passage: ‘And as many as were ordained to eternal life believed’. [Acts 13:48; Triglotta p 1065; FC SD 11, 8] We therefore believe, teach and confess that according to God's Word the righteous God could not have absolutely elected any person for salvation if He had not let him be redeemed, and if He had not chosen him for faith, that is, if He had not decided to give him faith at the same time; for outside of Christ there is no salvation (Acts 4:12) and ‘without faith it is impossible to please God’. [Heb. 11:6] So if the Calvinists do not want to know anything about election ‘in view of faith’, this means something quite different from our rejection of this doctrine. The Calvinists do this, as I have said, because according to their teaching, God first chose for salvation absolutely, without regard for Christ and faith; we do this because God’s Word teaches that God has chosen to give us not only salvation but also faith by grace, because the election to salvation and faith coincide. It is therefore an infamous perversion of our teaching if we are accused, as often happens, of excluding faith from the election of grace, and therefore of disregarding the doctrine of salvation through faith alone. … Rather, it is precisely we who consider faith for salvation so necessary that we believe, teach and confess that God, according to
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Rom. 8:19-30, first chose the elect to be called, and therefore to faith (not according to the chronological order, but according to the nature of the matter), to justification, and then for salvation. But we reject a doctrine according to which it might seem that God has decided to grant men salvation by grace, but not faith by grace from eternity, but has seen from this whether man himself will decide to come to faith.” — As an example of the fact that one could also reject one and the same thing in other matters, but in such a way that each party could have a motive that is different from others, the rejection of the auricular confession is also quoted there. This is rejected by the Calvinists, because they do not believe that the ministers of the church are given the power to truly forgive sins, but it is rejected by the Lutherans because according to the Papists, absolution is not founded on the power of the Gospel, but on the enumeration of all sins. — Finally, Dr. Walther writes there: If it is asked, did not God really choose all those of whom he foresaw that they would culminate in faith and remain in it until the end? This is our answer: Yes, of course; we have never rejected teaching in this way, but rather, understood correctly, expressly approved of it. (See Lehre und Wehre VII. IX. XVIII.) What we have rejected is that the election was made “in view of faith”, in the sense that God chose us because he had foreseen our faith or even our good “conduct” (conduct of man) against grace. As for the proceedings that took place in Chicago, they were to take place on the basis of the Article 11 of the Formula of Concord, so that in the end we would be reunited in one and the same confession. However, it became apparent that the opponents did not agree with paragraph 5 as it stood from the outset. There it says: “The eternal election of God, however, vel praedestinatio (or predestination), that is, God's ordination to salvation, does not extend at once over the godly and the wicked, but only over The eternal election of God but vel praedestinatio, i.e. God's decree for salvation does not go especially over the pious and evil, but only over
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the children of God, who were elected and ordained to eternal life before the foundation of the world was laid, as Paul says, Eph. 1:4-5: He hath chosen us in Him, having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ.” Already here it is clearly proven that the Formula of Concord only speaks of the so-called election in the strict sense. In general, the difference between a double election (“in a broad and narrow sense”) is quite alien to the Formula of Concord. On the other hand, the opponents argued that the Lutheran Church has long been talking about an election in the broader sense, which they ostensibly find in the eight points, paragraph 15-22, of the Formula of Concord, where the means of salvation are stated which constitute the main part of the election. They say that when this way of salvation: Whoever believes will be saved, is presented to men, there will be two kinds of people, those who do not believe and are lost, and finally those who believe to the end. In the case of the latter, they say, who remain as the product of the divinely ordered means of grace, the second part of election takes place, for, say they, the second part of the election of grace is the application on the part of the Judge of the stipulation of the universal will to save, which is based on what God has foreseen. — From this it was replied that the determination of the path of salvation necessarily belongs to the doctrine of God's election, on which He wants to lead His elect to eternal life, but that it is therefore not necessary to speak of an election of grace in the broader sense, the Bible and the Confessions know nothing about such a election, in neither of them is the expression: election of the means. “It is also a strange expression,” remarked Dr. Walther (see p. 3 in the minutes); a means is not a elect one after all. Of course, one cannot speak of the elect without speaking of the means; for this would be the same as if someone wanted to present the doctrine of reconciliation and wanted to say only that Christ lived and suffered and died. This would not be the doctrine of Reconciliation, for if I am to present it, I must show how the man created innocent from the beginning
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fell into original sin and real sin; I must also show how God is holy and therefore angry about sin. The doctrine of the law must be included until the actual act of reconciliation is reached. This is also the case here. First the teaching must begin with how God has redeemed the whole world. First the general decree of salvation must be set forth; anyone who did not consider this would not share the word properly. For this reason, the Formula of Concord also has this description of the doctrine by which our Lutheran Church was saved from Calvinism. What we teach is not an absolute election, but a conditional one. The conditions are: the grace of God, the merit of Christ, and faith; but these are conditions that we do not fulfil, but that God Himself fulfils for us and in us. Whoever now says that man fulfils them teaches what we however do not yet want to accuse the opponents, Pelagianism. But surely they should not always do us wrong and ascribe to us an absolute election when we say: God has decreed that the elect will certainly attain salvation. Election is not just a bare decree! Whoever believes will be saved, but the eight points here only show how God, who sincerely wants all to be saved and is working on them, in the same way that He wanted to make all saved, really leads the elect to salvation. That He does this in each of the individual chosen ones is stated in paragraph 23: ‘He has also chosen each and every person of the elect to salvation, and has also decreed that he wants to ....keep them in the way that is now reported, by his grace, gifts and efficacy, to bring them thereto.’ Consider the expressions, for example, ‘decreed’ [or ordained]. What God decrees must be done; if it were only to say: he wants to do it, it would be something else, because he wants to do it in the whole world, and yet it does not happen. When God sets something before Himself (decrees), He also carries it out; but what He only wants to do, that may possibly not happen. Just as the Formula of Concord understands the doctrine of election, also
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from paragraphs 45 — 47, where from the principle of God (Latin: in arcano suo proposito) the consolation is drawn for the believers that it is not only God's pleasure to make them saved, but that He has also purposed it, that is, He will really carry it out. Note also the expressions used in the Latin edition of the Formula of Concord (elegit, decrevirt), which leave no doubt about the understanding of the confession, and the Scripture passage used for consolation in paragraph 47. Paul says Rom. 8:[28] ‘who are called according to the purpose’. With it he teaches that God has made it His purpose to bring the believers (for of course only those who believe are mentioned) to salvation, and from this such a person, according to the confession, is to draw the conclusion: Who will separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, etc. This is not, as our dear brothers who oppose us say, merely attached in such a way that it is an election of persons, but rather this is the main thing, for the sake of the first points (the eight points) in the confession. It is only through an aequivocatio (i.e. when two quite different things are given the same name) that we can speak differently of an election. This is the election, that God brings certain persons on the path of salvation, receives them, albeit with interruptions, and finally makes them unfailingly saved. Therefore faith is not to be introduced here as the cause; for that is what it is about, whether I too can be certain of my salvation. My faith does not make me certain of this, for I must know whether I will remain in faith, for if not, I will be lost. Now if you are serious, do not speculate with reason, but know whether you can happily today or tomorrow on your deathbed, believing that I am chosen; do not fear the devil, the world, my flesh; I look to God to keep his promise to me, and he will not let me fall into unbelief and sin or false doctrine. But whoever is not in the true faith, it is not God who
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has revealed to him in His Word, but the devil has revealed to him that he is elected. It is also certain that the true believer always walks the narrow path with fear and trembling, as the Word of God demands, precisely because in faith he knows that he is a chosen child of God. Least of all, the opponents' doctrine of election is the pure one, since it is based on foreknowledge, or it is a judicial verdict. A judge is just; he looks at a person as he is according to his law, and he decrees accordingly. This would lead to the result that it would no longer be an election of grace at all. It would be as if I were to show and tell someone the way: ‘Now go on, and you shall reach your goal and obtain this and that’, and then I would say afterwards, ‘You see, I have chosen you for this’. This person might well say, ‘When I myself carry him to his goal’. Only He Himself is the faithful God, who has chosen and bears us, as He says John 15:16: “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain.”
On Saturday, October 2 (see page 52 of the minutes [p. 93 of Predestination]) the evaluation of the definition of Election of Grace presented by Prof. Stellhorn was continued. Dr. Walther declared that to understand by Election of Grace as a judicial application, based on the providence of God, is reasonable, but not confessional. Contrary to the Confessions is 1) the statement of the basis. For the basis is nothing other than the cause; the Confession says the exact opposite of the fact that God's foresight is the basis for the election. Thus we read in the Epitome, p. 557 [FC Ep 11, paragraph 20]: It is also rejected “that not only the mercy of God and the most holy merit of Christ, but also in us there is a cause of God's election, on account of which God has elected us to everlasting life.” It is also added that through such erroneous teachings all consolation is taken away from Christians. If the election of grace is merely that God has foreseen something in us, and has been induced to choose us, how can we then
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comfort ourselves? For He alone knows, we do not know. Then it doesn't do us any good. For we can always think: God knows in advance, perhaps He knows that I will be damned, or even if He knows that I will be saved, I do not know. We can see from Luther that in his time, people in his time usually had to face terrible temptations, Luther himself even to the point of death, because they always thought: God knows in advance what will happen to me, so my fate is determined. Now when Luther had such associates, he said: Yes, of course, one must admit that God knows everything in advance, even who will be saved and who will not. But it is the devil who leads you to cling to that. This foreknowledge is not revealed to you in the Word. God has instructed you in the Word if you want to know whether you are one of the elect. Likewise the passage in the Formula of Concord p. 723 paragraph 88, which goes back to Rom. 9, disputes with this definition — not out of merit of works, but out of the grace of the one who calls. 2) Not only what is said here is wrong in principle, but also the description of the nature of election is erroneous, if it is to be a judicial application of the general way of salvation. According to our confession, it is rather a cause of salvation, a decree of salvation, a bringing to eternal life, a making partaker of salvation. This is already clear by paragraph 8 p. 709 of the Formula of Concord: “The eternal election of God, however, not only foresees and foreknows the salvation of the elect, but is also, from the gracious will and pleasure of God in Christ Jesus, a cause which procures, works, helps, and promotes our salvation and what pertains thereto; and upon this [divine predestination] our salvation is so founded that the gates of hell cannot prevail against it, Matt. 16:18, as is written John 10:28: Neither shall any man pluck My sheep out of My hand. And again, Acts 13:48: And as many as were ordained to eternal life, believed.” From this it is clear that the Election of Grace on the chosen one is also a cause of faith according to our confession (taking care that it is not the only cause, for the Word
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of God, Baptism, the Lord's Supper is also a contributory cause that aids to salvation). According to the definition presented by Prof. Stellhorn, however, the application of the way of salvation would only be a judicial act of God, not a creating, working, promoting, helping! It is only after what is to happen in man has been done that God enters and pronounces the judgment: he shall be saved! This definition therefore presupposes the creation of salvation, the conversion. The conclusion of the eight points, where the sentence begins, speaks against this, in that it says: “And indeed, that is to say, it is of the utmost importance that all and every person of the elect, if he is to be saved through Christ, is so graciously considered, one should recognize it and hold fast to it that the election is not just an application, but a predestination, a decree, which is certainly to happen. — It became increasingly clear during these proceedings in Chicago that Prof. Stellhorn does not know, believe or teach any real Election of Grace, but only gives the name election of grace to the order of grace established from eternity, so that no one could say that he had none! Some readers of his writings, his Treatise and his Examination of the Illumination let themselves be misled by the fact that there is much talk in it about election, while the same is described as the order of grace, justification, the way to salvation and they are given the name election. Since these doctrines, without which the doctrine of the election of grace cannot and should not be presented and preached, are already known, familiar and undisputedly correct to the readers, some people do not notice the deception but think that this is in any case a correct teaching and fall to our opponents of today. But it also happened that already in Chicago quite a few people who had stood partly uncertain, partly completely on the side of the opponents arrived at clarity. Some of them openly admitted this, and one of them made the following statement on October 4 [Director Krauss, p. 65, Predestination, p. 105]: “Through repeated consideration of the reasons advanced by Dr. Walther and recorded in the minutes (just read), and in further conversations…, I have come to the conclusion that my former position is untenable.
Holy Scripture teaches it and the Formula of Concord says that gracious election is truly ‘a cause of our salvation and what belongs to it.’ I must say that I have until now viewed this article in the Formula of Concord incorrectly. I am happy and thank God that I now see my error. And I pray that during the course of these days, God will yet bring my brothers from the opposition to the same understanding.” Since this declaration is accompanied by the remark that he would wait until the course of the negotiations leads to the “passing by on the part of God”, the following should be mentioned here: Dr. Walther pointed (after page 85) to Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans, where he says that the sentence that God chose a certain number for salvation after his mercy is comforting to troubled ones, and then continued: “We do not know which rule God is [paragraph 57] following in this regard.” (The Formula of Concord also says on p. 716: “St. Paul sets us a goal in these and similar questions, as: why God gives His Word at one place [to one kingdom or realm], but not at another [to another nation]; removes it from one place [people], and allows it to remain at another; also, that one is hardened, blinded, given over to a reprobate mind, while another, who is indeed in the same guilt, is converted again”). “But we know this for sure, why God did not elect certain people. These cannot say on the Last Day: ‘How can I be accused of being damned, for God did not choose me!’ No, God will tell everyone: ‘I would well have granted it to you — that's what our Formula of Concord says. — I did not pass you by, but I moved you often, called you often; yes, you may have been a believer for a while, but you are still clinging to the devil, the world and your flesh. The fault is yours to go to hell.' But the believers will not say: ‘Ha, if only you (damned) had believed as we did, we have been converted and you have been and remained unbelievers. … Rather, for all eternity the elect will not be able to praise God enough that he has pulled them wretched worms of sin, which would have belonged in hell, out of the mud
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all the same. They will leave it to the good Lord to justify Himself that the others will all be thrown down into hell.”
The last sentence of the above words is also important, for although we do not teach Calvinist particularism, nor a two-part election, as will be shown below, the objection is raised against the particular election of the persons chosen for salvation and all that belongs to it, which is done by grace alone, that God would be unjust if he had not chosen all people in this way (strictly speaking, incidentally, a choice, called selection in the basic Greek text, can never be understood by all people in itself). It is certain that those who are lost will have no excuse; but just as in the realm of natural life there remain some mysteries that seem to clash with the justice of God (a mystery is not a contradiction, however), so it is even more true of the mystery of the election of grace (in which the true Christian always considers his own election to be the most wonderful because he does not recognize himself as better than others) that we do not have to judge God; But to all who hears His voice it will be revealed in the light of eternal life that God does everything with wise and holy purpose. It is an election of grace for us in our salvation. It is an election of grace revealed to us in the Holy Scriptures, not a trial as it takes place among men.
For a better overview, the doctrine of discernment concerning the election of grace, in so far as it exists between the present-day synergists, between Calvin and between the Lutherans who are faithful to the symbols, may be given in the following: Although the election of grace is based on God's general will of grace, according to which He does not want the death of the sinner, which is why the elect, by God's grace and power, would not approach their goal by any other means than through repentance and faith, it nevertheless follows from this order of salvation that those who despise it are condemned for their unbelief. The so-called election
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in a wider sense, called the chief part by Stellhorn, thus results in a separation of people into two parts. Therefore, anyone who considers the universal plan of salvation that goes over all people to be the main part of the election must teach a twofold election of persons as the conclusion that follows the main part. Stellhorn describes this election, which he also calls the election of grace in the narrowest sense, as follows: “Because God is omniscient and knew already from eternity how people would conduct themselves toward his sacred order which He had ordained for their salvation, namely whether they would use this order or despise it, therefore He took note of this, and in view of it decreed which persons should be inevitably saved, and which should be inevitably damned. So, according to Stellhorn, there is a decision of God based partly on the provisions of the general way of salvation and partly on the omniscience of God, for God already knows that there are people who believe and finally become blessed, and again those who do not believe and are therefore condemned. He knows the success of his general counsel of grace, and no one would think that this final success should be a election of grace in the narrowest sense, unless Stellhorn taught us to call it an election of grace! But it becomes clear from this that this decree, which is based on the omniscience of God and is determined by the behavior of both believers and unbelievers, is a two-part decision that affects all men, and it is certainly obvious to anyone who compares even the beginning of Article 11 of the Formula of Concord, how very different the Election of Grace that precedes it is from Stellhorn's doctrine. There it says [FC SD 4]: “First, the distinction between the eternal foreknowledge of God (according to which he sees and foreknows everything beforehand) and the eternal election of His children to eternal salvation, is carefully to be observed. For … … that God sees and knows everything before it happens, which is called God's foreknowledge [prescience], extends over all creatures, good and bad; namely, that He foresees and foreknows everything that is or will be … Matt. 10:29; Ps. 139:16; Is. 37:28” Furthermore, in contrast to this
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divine omniscience on which Stellhorn bases his election in the narrow sense, the Formula of Concord reads as follows [paragraph 5]: “The eternal election of God, however, vel praedestinatio (or predestination), that is, God's ordination to salvation, does not extend at once over the godly and the wicked, but only over the children of God, who were elected and ordained to eternal life before the foundation of the world was laid, as Paul says, Eph. 1:4” — From this it is 1) clear that the object of this predestination is solely the children of God, and by no means the whole of humanity, on which the general counsel of God is carried out to one side or the other, whereas a follower of F. A. Schmidt teaches that the Last Judgment, which separates those to damnation on the left and to salvation on the right, is the election in the proper sense, because it is there that the separation is made. One can see from this that this party wants to have a trial instead of the grace that elects. 2) The Formula of Concord here makes a great difference between divine omniscience or Providence, which goes beyond good and evil, and between the eternal election, for this (the election of grace) goes only over the children of God who are ordained to eternal life. According to Stellhorn, these are only known in advance (not predestined), just as those dying in unbelief are known in advance; that is why he also claims that God proceeds according to one and the same rule on both sides. Anyone who, instead of divine predestination, bases his election on an omniscience that goes in the same way, which knows the "conduct" of every human being, must finally teach man's self-decision instead of divine grace, and fall on a synergism (man's own participation in his conversion and salvation). Therefore, on this side, faith *) becomes a work of man and as a
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*) The members of the Ohio Synod love to say of election that it is obtained in view of the faith that takes the credit of Christ. No one among us denies that man
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cause of movement in God (according to F. A. Schmidt) or, as Stellhorn says, as an explanatory basis adds to the two causes exclusively taught by the Formula of Concord, namely to the mercy of God and the merit of Christ. Anyone who teaches an election made “in view of faith” in such a way that this indicates the reason why God was induced to choose this or that person, must fall out on the side of the semi-Pelagian Arminians, who taught a decision of God based on the faithful conduct of man. Since this decree is a double one, this doctrine is closer to Calvinist teaching than to purely Lutheran teaching. Even among our opponents of today, it is said that if it is true that the sum total of those who persevere to the end and those who are condemned has been determined and counted in God's omniscience, this is a mystery that one prefers to keep quiet about.
Calvin likewise teaches a double predestination, which, as he says, is based on a dreadful decree, for apart from Christ and without regard for Christ and faith, some are indeed chosen for eternal life, but the others
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becomes justified and saved through this faith, but where is it written that election is based on this faith? Just as love is a characteristic of faith, but by no means the basis for faith, so the saving faith in the elect is a mark of the election. Justification is a link in the chain of salvation according to Romans 8:30, and is made part of the believer through the appropriation of Christ's merit; but it is not by appropriating the election that one becomes a chosen one, for the chosen ones have been so from eternity, Ephesians. 1:4 before the foundation of the world was laid. That is why Musaeus already proved, as noted above [p. 366], that faith cannot possibly be in the same relationship to election as to justification. If a real Election of Grace were to be attained through faith, there could be no time-believers, because the Election of Grace only goes over those who become saved! That is why the elect remain elect, even during a temporary apostasy, as David's example shows, who went there for nine months without repentance or faith, and yet was a chosen one.
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were from eternity by an absolute decree predestined to damnation as a demonstration of divine punitive justice! According to this, the same would be punished even before they were born. Since the number of those who, according to Calvin, are predestined to damnation is much greater than the number of those who are to be saved through fellowship with Christ, the first of the elect, Calvin's doctrine is based much more on an election of wrath than on an election of grace. Calvin's doctrine of predestination as a whole is admittedly not based on divine omniscience, nor is it based on divine mercy, but only on the unlimited omnipotence [“God’s sovereignty”] of God, since from the very beginning everything that is and should become is concerned with his unalterable counsel. This decree is also frightening in that it is supposed to be a thoroughly secret one, for according to Calvin, just as according to Zwingli, the sacred means of grace, word and sacrament, should not be God's own testimony of His gracious and good will, but a deceptive semblance, whereby God condescends to let those who are predestined for damnation hear the Word of God outwardly, as if God meant it in his heart with most people differently than His Word reads. Even those who are named after Calvin must bring their inner spiritual nature with them, if the Word and the Holy Communion are to have any meaning for them. According to this Calvinist doctrine, the few chosen ones would be in an unconditional and unchanging state of grace from the very beginning, and would no longer need the preaching of the Law for repentance, according to the oral Word of the Gospel, whereby the poor sinner attains grace and forgiveness. We Lutherans do not know such ready-made saints. We know that God does not want to give the Spirit and faith to anyone without through the outward Word and sign (the holy sacrament). But anyone who, as a good Calvinist, speculates about the merely secret, inscrutable providence of God, will admittedly fear predestination as a fatalistic power hovering over him, and the more seriously
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he asks for a certainty of eternal life, the deeper he will sink into temptation, which is why our confessional writings reject Calvinism for the very reason that it does not bring salutary comfort, but only harm to souls. In our Synodical Reports we also say accordingly: “There is no man who could say: Yes, perhaps I am not chosen, what good is it for me to be baptized, to hear the sermon?” Whoever speaks in this way leads the language of the devil, because the power to believe lies in the Word! (See the Western Synodical Report of 1882. [English in Essays for the Church II, pgs 106-148]) The Formula of Concord also points to this on p. 720 [FC SD 76-77]: “The declaration, John 6:44, that no one can come to Christ except the Father draw him, is right and true. However, the Father will not do this without means, but has ordained for this purpose His Word and Sacraments as ordinary means and instruments; and it is the will neither of the Father nor of the Son that a man should not hear or should despise the preaching of His Word, and wait for the drawing of the Father without the Word and Sacraments. For the Father draws indeed by the power of His Holy Ghost, however, according to His usual order [the order decreed and instituted by Himself], by the hearing of His holy, divine Word, as with a net, by which the elect (who according to the Formula of Concord are forever in the heart of God) are plucked from the jaws of the devil. Every poor sinner should therefore repair thereto [to holy preaching], hear it attentively, and not doubt the drawing of the Father. For the Holy Ghost will be with His Word in His power, and work by it; and that is the drawing of the Father.”
With such words, the Lutheran Confession points us to the Holy Scriptures, as to the letter of grace of God, in which we recognize the revealed will of God, of which it says [paragraph 33] “With this revealed will of God we should concern ourselves, follow and be diligently engaged upon it, … and should not [attempt to] sound the abyss of God's hidden predestination, as it is written in Luke 13:24.” —
Our Formula of Concord hereby opens the father-heart of God to us and presents the biblical doctrine of grace,
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which we hold to be the purely Lutheran confession. This is not based on mere omniscience, which views human behavior (according to the present synergistic error), nor on a secret will to power (according to Calvinist heresy), according to which man would be given to a blind fate, but solely on God's mercy and the dear merit of Christ. The election to salvation would have a very weak foundation, if our own faith were even one of the causes of it. It should first of all be emphasized once again that such a election, which out of pure mercy in Christ saves according to the intention of His will, which makes us partakers of the redemption which is as eternal as the election in God (Heb 9:12), in that it does not only saves believers, but also makes faith work through the Word in those who are saved, cannot be a double decree, but must be a pure election of grace. Since only grace and salvation are acquired in Christ, He is the book of life, in which we become certain of eternal life through faith in His name and recognize ourselves as chosen children of grace. There is no book of death, although later teachers want to pretend a divine will of rejection. Election is God's eternal purpose in regard to the people to be saved, and no other. Predestination, according to the Formula of Concord, [FC Ep XI, 5] “extends only over the godly, beloved children of God, being a cause of their salvation, which He also provides, as well as disposes what belongs thereto. Upon this [predestination of God] our salvation is founded so firmly that the gates of hell cannot overcome it.” If the Formula of Concord in this sentence understood election, which is a cause of the salvation of the elect, in so broad a sense, as though the whole order of salvation were to be understood by it, it could not say the Election of Grace (of which it speaks) is for the pious children of God alone — for no one, except the most abominable Calvinists, will teach that the order of salvation and
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what belongs to it, as, for example, the doctrine of redemption, of the means of grace, of repentance, faith, etc., is for the pious, pleasing children of God alone! Since these doctrines concern all people, it follows that the Formula of Concord, while from the beginning of Article 11 it has the pious children of God in mind, speaks of the Election of Grace in the narrower sense, only that it describes it more fully for the sake of practical application, as already indicated above in the Chicago minutes.
[↑] Already in the January 15, 1880, Vol. 36, No. 2 issue of Der Lutheraner, Dr. Walther begins to show and to repeat in short sentences also for those readers who may not have read the synodical reports: “What our doctrine of the Election of Grace actually is, with which we also intend to remain until our death by God's grace. Then the dear reader may judge for himself whether our teaching is Calvinistic or whether it is not rather the pure doctrine of Luther, drawn from God's Word, our precious symbolic books and the most enlightened teachers of our dear Lutheran Church.” — This is followed in nos. 2-9 of the above-mentioned volume by thirteen sentences from the doctrine of the Election of Grace, to which testimonies from the Book of Concord and from the private writings of orthodox theologians are added, from which it can be seen that our doctrine is not a new doctrine that is unheard of in our Church, but the old, true Lutheran doctrine. These “Thirteen Theses” read as follows [excerpted from Christian Cyclopedia]:
Thesis 1.
We believe, teach and confess, that God loved the whole world from eternity, created all men unto salvation, none unto damnation, and that He earnestly wills the salvation of all men; and we therefore reject and condemn with all our heart the contrary Calvinistic doctrine.
Thesis 2.
We believe, teach and confess, that the Son of God came into the world for all men, that
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He bore and expiated the sins of all men, and that He fully redeemed all men, none excepted; we therefore reject and condemn the contrary Calvinistic doctrine with all our heart.
Thesis 3.
We believe, teach and confess, that God calls through the means of grace all men earnestly, that is, with the purpose that they should, through these means, be brought to repentance and faith, also be preserved therein unto their end, and thus be finally led to blessedness, conformable to which purpose God offers them through the means of grace the salvation wrought by Christ's atonement and the power to embrace this salvation by faith; and we therefore reject and condemn the contrary Calvinistic doctrine with all our heart.
Thesis 4.
We believe, teach and confess, that no one perishes because God was not willing that he be saved, passed him by with His grace, and because He had not also offered him the grace of perseverance and was not willing to bestow the same upon him. But all men that perish, perish because of their own fault, because of their unbelief and because they contumaciously resisted the Word and grace unto their end. The cause of this contempt of the Word is not God's foreknowledge (vel praescientia vel praedestinatio) but man's perverted will which rejects or perverts the means and the instrument of the Holy Spirit, which God offers unto it through the call, and it resists the Holy Spirit who would be efficacious and operate through the Word, as Christ says: Matth. 23:37, How often would I have gathered you together, and ye would not. (Form. of Concord p 718. par. 41.) Therefore we reject and condemn the contrary Calvinistic doctrine with all our heart.
Thesis 5.
We believe, teach and confess, that the elect or predestinated persons are only the true believers, who truly
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believe unto their end or yet at the end of their life; we reject therefore and condemn the error of Huber, that election is not particular, but universal and pertains to all men.
Thesis 6.
We believe, teach and confess, that the divine decree of election is unchangeable and that therefore no elect person can become a reprobate and perish, but that every one of the elect will surely be saved; and we therefore reject and condemn the contrary Huberian error with all our heart.
Thesis 7.
We believe, teach and confess, that it is foolish and soul-endangering, leads either to carnal security or despair to endeavor to become or be sure of our own election or eternal happiness by means of searching out the eternal secret decree of God; and we reject and condemn the contrary doctrine as an injurious fanatic notion with all our heart.
Thesis 8.
We believe, teach and confess, that a true believer ought to endeavor to become sure of his election from God's revealed will; and we therefore reject and condemn with all our heart the opposite Papistical error, that one may become or be sure of his election and salvation only by means of a new immediate revelation.
Thesis 9.
We believe, teach and confess: 1. That election does not consist in the mere fact that God foresaw which men will secure salvation; 2. That election is also not the mere purpose of God to redeem and save
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men, which would make it universal and extend in general to all men; 3. That election does not embrace those 'which believe for awhile'” (Luke 8:13.) 4. That election is not a mere decree of God to lead to bliss all those who would believe unto their end; we therefore reject and condemn the opposite errors of the Rationalists, Huberians and Arminians with all our heart.
Thesis 10.
We believe, teach and confess, that the cause which moved God to elect, is alone His grace and the merit of Jesus Christ, and not anything good foreseen by God in the elect, not even faith foreseen in them by God; and we therefore reject and condemn the opposite doctrines of the Pelagians, Semi-Pelagians and Synergists as blasphemous, dreadful errors which subvert the Gospel and therewith the whole Christian religion.
Thesis 11.
We believe, teach and confess, that election is not the mere divine foresight or prescience of the salvation of the elect, but also a cause of their salvation and of whatever pertains to it; and we therefore reject and condemn the opposite doctrines of the Arminians, Socinians, and of all Synergists with all our heart.
Thesis 12.
We believe, teach and confess, that God has also concealed and kept secret many things concerning the mystery of election and reserved them for His wisdom and knowledge alone, into which no human being is able and ought to search; and we therefore reject every attempt to inquire curiously also into these things which have not been revealed, and to harmonize with our reason those things which seem contradictory to our reason,
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may such attempts be made by Calvinistic or pelagianistic synergistic doctrines of men.
Thesis 13.
We believe, teach and confess, that it is not only not useless, much injurious, but necessary and salutary that the mysterious doctrine of election, in so far as it is clearly revealed in God's Word, be presented also publicly to Christian people, and we therefore do not agree with those who hold that entire silence should be kept thereon, or that its discussion should only be indulged in by learned theologians.
The reader will recognize that only through this confessional doctrine of the Election of Grace will God be given His glory "fully and completely", as the confession says, because this glory He shall have, that He alone saves. We may say the same of the content of these Theses, which are largely taken literally from the Formula of Concord, as the Formula for its part confesses with the words [paragraph 62]: “When we proceed thus far in this article, we remain on the right [safe and royal] way, as it is written Hos. 13:9: O Israel, it is your own fault that you are destroyed, but that there is help for you is pure grace on my part, [after Luther’s German]." — But the Formula of Concord says with caution that we may go only so far as in this article, because, as Thesis 12 says, man neither can nor should search out more than what is revealed in Holy Scripture [cp. FC SD paragraph 52]. “There must be a difference between what is revealed and what is not revealed in the Word of God. For about this God… has still kept secret and concealed much concerning this mystery, etc.” The reproach that Prof. Schmidt made to us, that it indicates a papal way of speaking of mysteries here, again meets here our church confession and our most distinguished teachers. The present doctrinal controversy shows that the Formula of Concord rightly says [FC SD paragraph 52-53].: “This admonition is most urgently needed. ....… because
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we cannot harmonize it, which, moreover, we have not been commanded to do.” Both the Calvinists and the Pelagian synergists want to make the incomprehensible comprehensible by drawing conclusions that are against God's Word. "The Calvinists take away God's glory by denying God's universal love and grace, and even blaspheme God by making Him the cause of sin, death and damnation. The Pelagian synergists, however, to which our opponents of today also belong, do not give God the honor He deserves, because they teach that in man lies not only the cause of damnation (which is true), but also the cause of salvation, namely, that some people are better than others, even if they do not say this so crudely.” (See Dr. Walther’s footnote to Proposition 12 in "Der Lutheraner” [p. 58]) It is still shown on p. 58 in Der Lutheraner that nowadays some people talk as the Lutherans about faith, and even that faith alone makes people just and saved, but nevertheless one can see especially in the works-driving sects that they also only give their faith for a good work, or for a condition and achievement that man must fulfill on his part, and not for a gift of grace, as Paul writes Eph 2:8: Thousands preach nothing but works under the name of faith, and so overturn the Gospel. Among the teachers who confirm Thesis 12 are Johannes Brenz and Chemnitz, Tim. Kirchner, together with Selnecker, as the three authors of the “Apology of the Formula of Concord” which was worked out against the Calvinists. [↑] In addition to what Luther writes on Genesis 26, one letter from Luther is particularly important, which Dr. Walther publishes under Thesis 11 under April 1, 1880 [p. 52-53], according to Seidemann of Dr. M. Luther's Letters, Open letters, and Theological Opinions, collected in full by Dr. de Wette. VI, 428 f. [StL 21, 3225 #3332, not in AE]. This letter, which is said to contain the entire doctrine of the Missourian Lutherans, reads as follows: “It is true that God had elected and predestined some men
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to eternal life before the foundation of the world was laid, while others have been rejected. But because God dwells in secrecy and his judgments are secret, we are not allowed to reach such a great depth, so we must descend upon Christ, to whom the Father has given all judgment. … If you now let yourself be found in Christ by faith, then know that you are predestined. If you do not allow yourself to be found in Christ through faith, but instead persecute the Word, despise Christ and do not want to know anything about him, then know that you are rejected. For as you let yourself be found in Christ, so you are in God the Lord, because the Father has transferred all judgment to his Son. … … If, by the way, one should speak according to the divine understanding (as far as the immutability of God is concerned), the judgment must stand firm: that he whom God chose before the foundation of the world cannot be lost, for no one will pluck the sheep out of the hand of their Shepherd; but whom He rejected cannot be saved, even if he has done all the works of the saints. God's judgment is so unchanging. You must therefore also look only to the majesty of the God who chooses, so that you may attain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ .... Predestination therefore in no way makes it possible for any (people) who are children of God to become children of the devil, or of a temple of salvation. Predestination rather makes it possible for children of the devil to become children of God, or for a temple of salvation to come out of an idolatrous temple. Predestination rather makes children of the devil become children of God, an idolatrous temple to become a temple of the Holy Spirit, and whores to become members of Christ, because He Himself binds the strong and robs them of their household goods (Matt. 12:29) and saves them from the authorities of darkness and transfers them from shame into glory. But those of whom 1 John 2:19 applies went out voluntarily, fell voluntarily. And because they were foreknown as those who would fall, they were
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not predestined. But they would have been predestined if they had been returned again and remained in holiness and truth. Take heed: This predestination of God is a cause for many to stand, for no one a cause to fall.” *) (Written on August 8, 1545).
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*) Although, if Stellhorn were right, for example, the last sentence should be reversed and should read something like this: Standing fast is a cause of predestination, — yet Stellhorn has the cheek to tailor this passage, duly mutilated, to be cut in such a way that he wants to find in the sentence: “If they had remained in truth and holiness,” a reference to his doctrinal system based on works righteousness. In that letter Luther quotes the words of Prosper, a student of Augustine. The fact that it expressly states: Predestination makes children of the devil become children of God (through faith) cannot prevent Stellhorn from making even Luther a witness to his false doctrine. For with him it says of such words of Luther's: "Bird eat, or die! Let the following example show this: As is well known, Luther wrote the famous introductions to the Epistles to the Romans and Ephesians as early as 1522, three years before he wrote the letter against Erasmus, during the time when, as is admitted in Germany, he stood in sharp contrast to Pelagianism. Nevertheless, Luther must have taught after the manner of Stellhorn even then. Stellhorn achieves this by a willful twisting of the sentence: “In this (Ephesian) epistle St. Paul teaches first of all what the Gospel is — as it is provided and started out from God alone in eternity, that all who believe in it are just, pious and blessed ... ...he does so through the first three chapters.” Aeg. Hunius, who is otherwise held up by Stellhorn, translates as follows: In hac epistola docet Paulus primum, quid sit evangelium. quomodo a solo deo in aeternitate praedefinitum et per Christum aquistitum, et promulgatum, quod omnes, qui ei credunt, justificari, vivificari, salvari debeant. This Latin translation Dr. Walther's also proves irrefutably against Stellhorn that Luther does not write here about the election of grace, but describes the Gospel as it goes out into the world according to God's will. This alone was decreed by God and earned, that all who believe it may be justified and saved; so says Luther; but Stellhorn underlines the word "it" and because the word “provided” stands next to it (== constat), whereby Luther wants to say: “It is certain that …” Stellhorn relates the word "it" to the previous Gospel and claims: here Luther teaches: Only the Gospel is provided! So here Luther must teach the so-called election in a broader sense,
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“This predestination of God is a cause for many to stand fast”, wrote Luther in the last days of his life, and it is this Scriptural doctrine that is consistently presented the Formula of Concord as a special source of comfort and strengthening in the face of temptation. Pastor Allwardt, on the other hand, confessed his false position in Chicago: “In temptation for the sake of his salvation, I cannot comfort anyone with the Election of Grace. I must use other passages.” When the writer of this book pointed out to Prof. Stellhorn himself that both the Holy Scriptures and the Formula of Concord has certain ("special") persons in mind for the Election of Grace, that even the third main part of the Small Catechism in its last words confessed the Election of Grace in its personal application to a certain hope of salvation as a decree for eternal life: “and will give me and all the faithful in Christ an eternal life,” Stellhorn answered to the horror of many of his brethren in the ministry at that time: “I do not know whether I am chosen in the strict sense!” He added: “I should believe and hope that.” (p. 21). But what kind of faith and hope is that which rests on uncertainty? (See Hebr. 11:1.) Prof. F. A. Schmidt also polemicized from the outset against the fact that our doctrine of Election by Grace so firmly assures the state of grace of Christians, even though the Formula of Concord itself always aims at it.
So, with our opponents today,
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the continuation of the means of grace! It is a pity that Luther would teach beyond Stellhorn, who teaches that the way of salvation is the main part, but Luther should teach according to this perversion: The Gospel is alone the election of grace, namely as the means of grace! And this hoax the whole present Ohio Synod allows to be imposed on itself, because despite Dr. Walther's refutation, one reads this sophistic distortion once again in the Ohio Synodical Report of 1881, p. 17, below. What if Luther, who represented his writing against Erasmus until his death, were to come back today and read this distortion of his words? At a German university such a professor, as Stellhorn is, would be impossible; but in Columbus, Ohio, is this party man is the cock of the roost!
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a second error comes to light, which is as old as the Roman Catholic doctrine of doubt, because already in his Examen of the Council of Trent M. Chemnitz reproaches the Roman teachers: They say that nobody can be sure whether he will be saved!: They say no one can be sure whether he will be saved! F. A. Schmidt writes today against us that we should not take away the fear of hell from the younger Christians, *) because as long as one does not find his name literally inscribed in the Bible among the elect, no Christian can be certain of his own future salvation, which would mean that he would have to take comfort in something unwritten. On the other hand, the Formula of Concord says of the pure Lutheran doctrine of the Election of Grace that it [FC SD 11, 45-46] “Thus this doctrine affords also the excellent, glorious consolation that God was so greatly concerned about the conversion, righteousness, and salvation of every Christian, and so faithfully purposed it [provided therefor] that before the foundation of the world was laid, He deliberated concerning it, and in His [secret] purpose ordained how He would bring me thereto [call and lead me to salvation], and preserve me therein. Also, that He wished to secure my salvation so well and certainly that, since through the weakness and wickedness of our flesh it could easily be lost from our hands, or through craft and might of the devil and the world be snatched and taken from us, He ordained it in His eternal purpose, which cannot fail or be overthrown, and placed it for preservation in the almighty hand of our Savior Jesus Christ, from which no one can pluck us, John 10:28. 46] Hence Paul also says, Rom. 8:28. 39: Because we have been called according to the purpose of God, who will separate us from the love of God in Christ?” According to the Latin translation, the sentence reads: “Therefore Paul builds the certainty of our salvation on the foundation of the divine purpose.” With the fact that these opponents claim
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*) In Old and New I. p. 10 it says: “Christians are from day to day on trial between fear and hope, as between two millstones.” Truly a poor consolation! The Formula of Concord, on the other hand, wants to make use of this in Article 11 [paragraph 25]: “how, we can know, whence and whereby we can perceive who are the elect that can and should receive this doctrine for comfort”, p. 709.
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that no believer can be certain of his election, and therefore also of his salvation, because, as the Lutheran confession says in short words, only the elect will be saved, they argue both against the confession and against the clear Scriptures, Luke 10:20; John 15:16; John 15:19; Rom 8:33-39; Eph. 1:4; 2 Thess. 2:13. However, this grave error, against which the ninth convention of the Evangelical-Lutheran Synodical Conference in 1882 [text] protested, follows with necessity from the fact that those opponents let the faith that God must see precede the election as their cause and as the achievement of men, since now man cannot know in advance whether he will remain true to his faith, so he also cannot know with certainty whether he is an elect and will be saved. This is why it was already asserted against the opponents in Chicago: “If the election is to be based on the foreseen faith, this is hereby equated with a human work or merit; faith is thereby made a cause of the election, thus pure synergism is pronounced.” It was already testified to Prof. Stellhorn there during the discussions that the main difference lies in the doctrine of conversion. Either he made faith a self-determination of man, so that man's own participation would decide about hell and heaven, or he let faith be God's gift alone, in which case he had to admit "that God did not only decide to make the faithful blessed, but also to give faith to those who will be blessed (i.e. the elect). — This is why the Formula of Concord teaches in the article of free will [FC SD 2, 60]: “God the Lord draws the man whom He wishes [decreed] to convert.”
[↑] A Fundamental Error in the Doctrine of Conversion
became so obvious among the opponents of the old Lutheran doctrine of grace that that they themselves admitted that this was the real
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difference. Although at the basic proof passage, Eph. 1:3-6, it is clearly written that God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has chosen us through Christ … … according to the purpose of His will, in praise of His glorious grace, nevertheless in this dispute it became more and more evident that the opponents make the election of those who will be saved dependent on the conduct of their human will. While the opponents had to admit that since Adam's fall into sin, the natural will has been caught in the power of the devil, that is, that the natural man cannot imagine, strive, and do anything but sin, as the Formula of Concord teaches in Article II Of Original Sin, the Columbus Magazine and the periodicals published by the Ohio Synod teach quite clearly that man can not only outwardly hear and contemplate the Word of God by natural forces, which we also teach in our Lutheran confession, but that he can also refrain from the so-called wanton resistance against the inner grace of conversion by natural forces. This omission of wanton reluctance is rooted only in the person who wills (in the subject which wills) and is entirely natural. Since according to this the person himself opens the door to the Holy Spirit, who is to convert him fully, by no longer wilfully resisting Him, the decision to convert and be saved would be placed in the person's own hands. But the Holy Scriptures teach that man is dead in sin, and that the carnal sense of the unconverted man is an enmity against God, Rom. 3:7. While he is dead in sin, he can take hold of evil with his will, but in no way of what is good.While he is dead in sin, he may well be able to seize evil with his will, but in no way can he seize what is good! Just as it is shown in temporal life that man can help himself to death, but cannot give life to himself, for no dead man makes himself alive, so it is the same with spiritual life, in faith in the grace of God, and even more so that the new birth from God is a new creation of God in
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in man, brought about by the Holy Spirit, for it is God who gives life to the dead, and calls out to that which is not that it should be. “It is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” Phil. 2:13: Of course, the conversion of a person is not without much sighing, fear and trembling, but it is the Holy Spirit who does this and opens the door of the heart, as it says of Lydia [Acts 16:14]: “Whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul.” If even in those who have already been born again there is still a reluctance in their flesh, which is why they have to complain with St. Paul: “I do that which I would not” [Rom. 7:16], and such reluctance remains until death, how much less can the unconverted man, who is nothing but flesh and therefore an enemy of God, refrain from willful reluctance! This proof is given by the Formula of Concord against the semi-Pelagians and the Philippists, and although the Ohioans and others want to defend themselves against the accusation as if they taught that man contributes to his conversion by his natural will, for the latter's will is only passive (pure passive), it is certain that they want to put into this passive behavior a property of the natural man, after which he has the strength to let go of willful reluctance, and thereby prepare himself in such a way that from now on his conversion must take place. To stand still in this way would in any case require an inner decision on the part of the natural man, which the natural man is incapable of, for his thoughts and aspirations are only evil. It is also contrary to all experience, after which a thief and other gross sinners have been converted, while good-natured and honorable people often become hardened. According to this teaching, the natural man, who until then had been hostile to God's will, would nevertheless suddenly have to prove a certain inner pleasure in the Gospel by standing still on his previous path out of his own instinct and will, and through this “encounter” the grace of God, and finally
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cause his own election. *) — It is clear that, according to this teaching, the election should depend on the behavior of the person, the Lord Christ should not have said: I have chosen you out of the world [John 15:19], as those who were also in natural perdition, but He should have said: You are chosen as a result of your conversion! That is why the opponents rejected it when it was reproached to them that the children of God owe all spiritual goods, also their calling and conversion to the Election of Grace, Eph. 1:3, that also the confession in Article 11 of the Formula of Concord teaches clearly and unambiguously that God has taken into account the conversion of every Christian and has given counsel about it.
[↑] In the Pastoral Conference held in Fort Wayne in 1881, where the last oral proceedings with the synergistic opponents took place, Dr. Walther gave these and others the following to consider: “You just do not believe what the Formula of Concord says [FC SD 11, 44]: ‘Moreover, all opiniones (opinions) and erroneous doctrines concerning the powers of our
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*) Since Stellhorn perceived that his party, through the above doctrines, was falling into the ways of the Roman doctrines, which, through the so-called meritum de congruo, ascribe to the natural man the power to accomplish a good performance for the time being, Stellhorn taught that the Holy Spirit gives man free will, whereby he can either submit or not submit. But this doctrine is refuted in the Ohio publications by P. Eirich, Stellhorn's like-minded associate: “It is nonsense… as if a man, by calling and prevenient grace, gets a free will and is endowed with powers of grace, and that the unconverted man then uses these powers of grace afterwards only for his conversion. ... This use of the powers of grace presupposed faith. There we have conversion before conversion.” No, truly, that's not the way things are. The best later dogmatists rejected Latermann's synergism as contrary to Scripture; if, however, several newer ones warm it up again, as Stellhorn does, it remains true: If a man is to come from death to life, he cannot do so if God would also give him life forces so that he could awaken himself! He would then have to be awakened to it, so that he could awaken himself! But that is nonsense.
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natural will are thereby overthrown, because God in His counsel, before the time of the world, decided and ordained that He Himself, by the power of His Holy Ghost, would produce and work in us, through the Word, everything that pertains to our conversion.’ … … God saw how I would conduct or handle myself. But according to His omniscience, He knows it in advance, and since He knows now that I will conduct myself well, He says: ‘That one is elect.’ A horrible doctrine! No, the counsel God took was: ‘How do I bring the poor sinner into heaven?’ There He decided that He will bring me to the knowledge of the Gospel, work faith, strengthen faith, preserve me in temptation, and when I falter to raise me up and preserve me until the end. That is my comfort. I have drawn it from Scripture and the Confession, and it appears that you do not want to admit that. You say: ‘That certainly belongs with it. But man must accomplish it and God sees whether he accomplishes it.’ You are led to ruin when you reject what is said as Calvinism that ‘God did not merely reckon me in the sense that He envisioned how I would behave, but in the sense that He decided to bestow this grace upon me as He says: Ί have selected you from the world.’ He says, ‘out of the world,’ not ‘I have chosen you from among the believers’ ... And I also believe that about me. Had God not chosen me, I would not have come to the knowledge of Christ. I also would not have sought the Gospel had it not sought me. We count all that as election, not according to our faith, but according to Scripture. And the Confession says the same thing.” [ref. Predestination, p. 174-175]
According to this doctrine of ours, although the election only concerns those who “will certainly be saved”, it is not an arbitrary pattern, nor can it be compared to a threatening cloud hanging over us, as the Calvinist doctrine is, which gives no certainty. On the contrary, we teach: Behold, God was serious about your calling, “Whoever now stands in faith, let him believe the promise of God, that God
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will preserve him and save him. Every believer should consider himself an elect, that is, one whom God has certainly decided to save. In addition, one must also teach that all those who do not believe or fall away are themselves to blame for this; they themselves alone are to blame for this, not that God has denied them election; God has not predestined anyone to damnation.” Dr. Walther himself said: “— — We do not want to give man a share in his salvation, but give glory to God alone. That is our interest. As the Formula of Concord says [FC SD 11, 87]: ‘By this doctrine and explanation of the eternal and saving choice [predestination] of the elect children of God His own glory is entirely and fully given to God, that in Christ He saves us out of pure [and free] mercy, without any merits or good works of ours, according to the purpose of His will.”
Since today’s synergism has also become dominant in Protestant areas, as recently theologians in Philadelphia admitted, it is not surprising that our synergistic opponents do not lack followers. In his Kirchliche Glaubenslehre, the sainted Philippi also confesses: “It is only too much in the nature of man to want to owe righteousness and salvation not only to grace alone but also to himself.” — Even among our opponents of today it became increasingly clear that the accusation of Calvinism which they made against us was intended to give a semblance of justification to their synergism. — Although the Formula of Concord, in Article 2 “On Free Will or Human Powers”, is based on Scripture in relation to the synergists: John 8:34, Eph. 2:5 and 2 Tim. 2, and calls and declares as the teaching, faith and confession of our Church [FC SD II, 7, 18]: “Hence the natural free will according to its perverted disposition and nature is strong and active only with respect to what is displeasing and contrary to God; but from its innate, wicked, rebellious nature it resists God and His will hostilely, unless it be enlightened and controlled by God's Spirit”,
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so our opponents now nevertheless teach that in the natural man, because of the freedom left to him, it is possible to refrain from resisting the work of God's grace, and this cessation of resisting is the reason on which the election is based! (See the Rostock “Gutachten” of May 1884 [by Dieckhoff, etc.], printed and approved by Prof. F. A. Schmidt, and the refutation written by Prof. A. L. Gräbner, which is printed in Lehre und Wehre, Sept. 1884). First of all, it is certain that if man, as the above doctrine promises him, were in the position of such “omissions [of resisting], etc.”, he would already have made himself a friend of God out of an enemy, for Christ says: “He that is not against us is for us,” Mark 9:40 and Luke 9:50, and he who does not rebel against God is also doing the will of the Father in heaven! — In the second place, the doctrines of the Holy Scriptures are taught in opposition to this, which already says in Gen. 6:5 that the human heart is only ever evil in its imagination of the thoughts, so that no freedom to refrain from this evil is granted to the natural man. According to John 3:6 and Rom. 8:5-7 all men without exception are carnally minded and: “To be carnally minded is an enmity against God.” An enmity that did not resist would not be an enmity at all! That is why we also teach with the Formula of Concord in Part II Art. II paragraph 20 [text from paragraph 59] : “Man resists the Word and will of God, until God awakens him from the death of sin, enlightens and renews him.” The freedom of the children of God is the goal towards which the Holy Spirit is working; the Formula of Concord also teaches [paragraph 60]: “Although God does not force man to become godly … yet God the Lord draws the man whom He wishes [decreed] to convert, and draws him in such a way that his darkened understanding is turned into an enlightened one and his perverse will into an obedient one. And this [just this] is what the Scriptures call creating a new heart.” — It is God who works such things in us (Phil. 2:13), and it only happens
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through his grace that we believe His holy Word! But He does not do this with such a natural necessity as prevails in the kingdom of power, but through the supernatural but spiritual power of His Word, which is applied to the reason and will of man. So it is only as a result of conversion that man, as a reborn child of God, can be merry and willing to do good. Already at the beginning of the year 1882 Prof. Schmidt declared in Old and New that he stood quite differently from the Missouri Synod in the doctrine of conversion, which is why Dr. Walther shows with the following the actual point of contention (Der Lutheraner, vol 38, No. 12:)
[↑] The Real Point of Contention.
In No. 12 of the publication Old and New the editor finally admits what actually the difference between his teaching and that of the Missouri Synod really consists. For he writes on p. 184: “The real difference between us and the Missourians is this: Missouri claims that the cessation of willful, obstinate reluctance to convert is grace,” which the editor and his followers do not believe! Rather, they believe that man is able to refrain from malicious or willful and stubborn reluctance by his own natural powers. It is not surprising, then, that these people acted so angrily and furiously against our doctrine of the Election of Grace. This is precisely because they are a kind of Pelagians, who claim that man can and must do something to convert and be saved; to claim that man converts and becomes saved by the grace of God alone is a completely unreasonable doctrine. Praise be to God that he has now delivered into our hands our enemies who are so fierce. For they could not have revealed more clearly that they are our enemies because they are enemies of the true Lutheran faith.
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In 1520, Luther issued 20 concluding statements on infused faith, in which Luther had already fought the same false doctrine against the papal theologians, which our opponents are now setting up and defending as theirs, and indeed as the genuine Lutheran doctrine. For this is what Luther writes in the ninth concluding statement:
“Some say that it is enough that man does not put an obstacle in the way, that is, that he has no intention of sinning, and that man can do that of his own free will. Others make it even worse when they say that man, whether he is well harboring an evil purpose, he could remove the obstacle and make it not there, or he can make a good purpose for himself from the same freedom of his will. All this is ungodly and heretical. For, as St. Paul writes Gal. 5:17, ‘For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, … so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.” So now the Spirit is not able to dampen the flesh and the lusts of the flesh, much less a man who is without the Spirit and is overcome by evil lust. But out of error and ignorance that man is a liar and vain apart from the faith of grace and therefore, as long as he is in the sin of unbelief, has an obstacle and evil purpose, they do not see this great obstacle and meanwhile let themselves dream of another obstacle, namely of the purpose to sin; that it is not a sinful purpose if man does not believe God and makes His Word a lie. Just as it is not in man's power to believe God, so it is not in his power to put away the sin of unbelief and thus also to remove the obstacle to grace. But grace alone, as it gives faith, so it also removes the obstacle, for it prepares man and destroys sin" (XIX, 1733 f. [StL 19, 1427-1428]) Woe to the listeners whom your preacher wants to make believe that they must and could remove the obstacle, that is, the malicious reluctance, for they need no grace!
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The convention of the Evangelical Lutheran Synodical Conference, which took place in Chicago in October 1882, also protested against the synergistic idea that a person can give up willful resistance to the inner grace of conversion, not by grace but by his own natural forces or by virtue of his free will. It is proved on p. 15 of the minutes of that meeting that this quite terrible doctrine not only falsifies and nullifies the doctrine of the Election by Grace, but also overturns the doctrine of justification by grace alone, solely for the sake of Christ and solely by the faith worked by God. According to the false doctrine of our opponents, however, as Prof. Schmidt says in his Theses, election in the strictest sense “presupposes the behavior of men”. But while becoming righteous before God must have the same “presuppositions” as salvation, the righteousness of man before God must also depend on the same presupposition of good conduct! — In this matter, then, the crown of all doctrines must be at last preserved, the doctrine of justification, so that this article, with which the Church stands or falls, may remain pure, and that St. Paul may also be right with us, if he is right with Eph. 2:8 exclaims: “By grace! — and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God!”
For those who wish to learn more about the doctrine of the Election of Grace and the doctrinal controversy in question, here is an overview of the publications of the Missouri Synod relating to it.
First of all, five volumes of Lehre und Wehre (Doctrine and Defence) from 1880-1884, volumes 26-30, are worthy of special mention: The essay written by Pastor G. Stöckhardt: “Scriptural Evidence for the Doctrine of the Election of Grace”. This article is contained in five monthly issues from June to October 1880 and gives the Scripture statements about the election of grace in the following
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order: 1) How does Holy Scripture describe the Election of Grace? 2) What does Holy Scripture teach about the certainty of the Election of Grace? 3) To what does Holy Scripture refer Christians so that they may be certain of their election? — This topic had been the basis for the proceedings at a Southeastern Conference of the Western District in 1880, whereupon Pastor G. Stöckhardt freely edited the relevant minutes and at the same time, in the above article, substantiated, by scriptural evidence, the Thirteen Theses (namely 5, 9, 10, 11) already published in the Der Lutheraner at the beginning of the same year. — Dr. Walther wrote the following in the volume for 1880: “Dogmatic History of the Doctrine of the Relationship of Faith to the Election of Grace”, furthermore a reprint of a locus in the German Enchiridion, composed by Tim. Kirchner. The same is about “God's eternal election”. Since Tim. Kirchner is the main author of the famous Apology of the Formula of Concord, which has been acknowledged as correct everywhere, Dr. Walther remarks at the end of p. 329, on the presentation of the doctrine of the Election of Grace as presented by Tim. Kirchner, the following: “Hopefully no one will smell Calvinism in it. Anyone who would do so would simply make himself ridiculous and clearly betray that he knew neither Lutheran nor Calvinist doctrine, or that he was an enemy of the doctrine of our Church, who, since he cannot refute it from God's Word, would at least try to awaken a dread of it by blaspheming it as Calvinism.
In the year 1881 of Lehre und Wehre there is a detailed article by Dr. Walther on: “The Synergistic-Pelagian Doctrine of Election of Grace”, which is included in the issues from May to September. It is proven there that such a doctrine, as it is held by today's opponents, has ever been rejected in the best times of our Church.
In the 1882 edition of Lehre und Wehre, the July and August issues, there is among other things an answer to the question: Is the later doctrine of the election by grace really the
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original Lutheran and confessional one?” Already in an article immediately preceding this essay the author Dr. Walther on p. 249 had expressed the hope: “The history of the American Lutheran Church will one day, when the most hated persons will have left the battlefield, proclaim that Missouri had simply returned to the Church of the Reformation in respect to the doctrine of Election of Grace”.
The 1883 edition of Lehre und Wehre contains a Foreword written by Prof. Pieper, in which he proves in detail that the Lutheran Church in America would have lost its character of being the Church of the Reformation if it had been based on Prof. Schmidt and his comrades, because the latter denied the Lutheran doctrinal principle: “Holy Scripture alone is the source and norm of the Christian faith”. The opponents denied that free will is nothing, and in connection with this, both, that man becomes righteous and saved by grace, and that a Christian should be certain of his salvation in faith. Finally, in this Foreword, Prof. Pieper proves (see February issue) that, according to the opposing doctrine, justification, if given at the price of the cessation of willful reluctance, would no longer be a gift “without merit”, but a bargain, even if the gift on the part of man was only small. The specific difference between the Law and the Gospel would be completely eliminated on the opposite side. If one wants to give even a small human achievement as a basis for grace, grace is nevertheless completely abandoned, because one more or less is not important here: “Grace is not grace if it is not completely grace.” This Foreword concludes with an important quote from Luther. The 1883 volume also contains an article written by Pastor G. Stöckhardt on the vindication of the old Lutheran doctrines of the Election of Grace and of Conversion against
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the exhibitions and attacks of modern German theology, and it proves conclusively that it is no glory for our opponents that today's mediating German theology in this doctrinal dispute approves of them, it is rather a testimony against them.
The 1884 volume contains a Foreword written by Professor R. Lange, which emphasizes the Scripture Principle over rational conclusions that go against the Analogy of Faith. In addition, Dr. Walther, under the heading “A Report on a Development”, castigates the gross distortions which both the history of the doctrinal controversy and the doctrine itself had received through an article in the Leipzig General Evangelical-Lutheran Church News. The anonymous author of this slanderous article in the Leipziger Kirchenzeitung, titled “aus Amerika” [Dec. 14, 1883: p. 1175-1180] is not unjustly portrayed in Lehre und Wehre as the American Jansen [Jansenism?].
Finally, a listing of the individual writings of Dr. Walther concerning the Election of Grace controversy may follow:
In the Lutheran Concordia Publishing House of St. Louis there appeared:
a) The Controversy Concerning Predestination, a small tract, contains simple advice for those who would like to know who is Lutheran and who is not in the present controversy concerning the doctrine of Predestination.
b) The Doctrine of the Election of Grace in Question and Answer, Presented from the Eleventh Article of the Formula of Concord of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. With a preface and epilogue by C. F. W. Walther (59 pages);
c) Illumination of the Stellhorn Treatise on the Election of Grace Controversy, from the same author (77 pages);
d) Correction of the "examination" of Prof. Stellhorn, written by the same author (157 pages).
This writing contains a detailed, and for everyone instructive, refutation of the preceding Stellhorn writing. In the Preface, Dr. Walther proves that he would gladly, albeit at great sacrifice, have spared the dear Christian people the
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public controversy about this doctrine, even from the beginning. But it had happened to him, as it had once happened to the theologians in Wittenberg, when the wild spirit Samuel Huber stood up against them and also accused them of Calvinism in the doctrine of the Election of Grace. — The intention that Dr. Walther had when he authored these writings is made clear in the following sentence, which can be found in Volume 26, p. 329 of Lehre und Wehre:
“May the Lord have mercy on our precious American Lutheran Church, and help her that she, as she has done so far in all other points of doctrine, goes back to the doctrine and confession of the Church in the age of the Reformation, so also in the high article of the Election of Grace, which is so incomprehensible to reason, and in this way, here in this last land of God's visitation of grace with His Word, also learn more and more about the blessing with which God once so abundantly showered on our church 350 and 300 years ago.” *)
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*) To the list of publications dealing with the election controversy also the following should be added:
The 21st, 22nd and 23rd Synodical Report of the Western District of the Synod of Missouri, Ohio and Others States of 1877, 1879 and 1880.
Sir, if you are not attending a congregation and receiving our Lord's gifts of forgiveness, life and salvation through the absolution, the sermon, and the Lord's Supper you are placing yourself in a horrendous situation of the risk of eternal damnation.
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Rev. Paul T. McCain passed away on Nov. 25, 2020. His comment of Sept. 27, 2020 was withheld until Jan. 9, 2021. My response to him is in my blog post "Paul McCain- last comment to BTL; his passing (The Book in his hands)" of Jan. 9, 2021.
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