6. Man Can Prevent His Conversion.
resistibilis est). Although God alone, and with almighty power (Eph. 1:19; 2 Cor. 4:6), works to bring about conversion, man can prevent his conversion, Matt. 23:37: od« NOEAjoats, Acts 7:51: to avebdpatt TO ayiy Gvtimintete.
conversion directly or in covered majesty, but by the means of His Word. When Christ works, as in the Last Day, in revealed divine majesty (€v ti 40En adtod the possibility of resistance is excluded: all nations (mavta TO €0vn)will be gathered before Him (Matt. 25:31). When the same Christ, through the means of the Word, wanted to gather people to Himself: "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matt. 11:28) and gather the children of Jerusalem like a hen gathers her chicks under her wings (Matt. 23:37), resistance was possible. Christ himself reports the result: Ye would not! Scripture expressly forbids us to interpret the divine effect through the means of the Word as less divine or less omnipotent.!79) why not all people are converted in the conversion process that extends over a longer period of time. The situation is the same as when the world was created. If the world really had been created in "six periods of indefinite duration" instead of six days, the creation of the world would still remain the same incomprehensible miracle of omnipotence. If our present marvelous generation consoles itself with the six periods of indefinite duration, the consolation does not lie in the long periods, but in the fact that one allows oneself, in the darkness of the periods, to put a kind of self- development of the world (evolution) in place of the gradually working omnipotence of God. Thus the consolation of conversion for the hosts of synergistic thoughts does not actually lie in the gradualness of conversion, but in the injection of "moral" achievement into gradualness. Nothing else is the real meaning of opposition to the conversion that is taking place in an instant.
2:5 (év dvvapet God); Joh. 1:12-13 (Ek Oeod éyewnOnoav). Quenstedt II, 713: Hominis conversio est solius gratiae divinae operantis actio et perficitur per eandem infinitam potentiam, per quam Deus ex nihilo aliquid creat et ex mortuis resuscitat. (The conversion of man is only the action of the grace of God at work, and is accomplished by the same infinite power by which God creates something out of nothing and raises it from the dead.] So we have to leave it at the fact that Luther has also stated: God by means can be resisted, God in revealed majesty cannot be resisted.!7°* On this point both the Calvinists and the Synergists are mistaken. The Calvinists eliminate gratia universalis by means of gratia resistibilis, claiming that what God seriously intends must actually happen in every case. "It cannot be supposed that God intends what is never accomplished."!° The Synergists eliminate sola gratia by means of gratia resistibilis, claiming that conversion and salvation depend not only on God's action of grace, but also on right human conduct toward grace, right use of the freedom left to man toward the divine action of grace, and so on..!?°°)