LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

BAUE: THE CURRENT DEBATE ON PREDESTINATION 37
damnation. The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart was due to his own sin, not
God’s predestination. The “vessels of wrath” in Romans 9:22-23 had ample
opportunity to repent; God sought to save them before consigning them to
perdition. Pieper demonstrates that in Romans 9:22 the active voice is used
in referring to salvation, the passive voice in damnation. God is the active
agent of salvation, and damns a man only as a last alternative and as a result
of his obduracy:
Calvin and his followers commit the folly of attempting to extract a doctrine
of predestination to damnation from the historical facts which Scripture
expressly declares to be incomprehensible and unfathomable for us. They
pretend to have a knowledge which they cannot possibly have. 71
Pieper sums up by saying:
Whoever is saved, is saved by God’s grace alone; whoever is lost, is lost
solely by his own fault. This mystery is taught also by the Lutheran
dogmaticians of the sixteenth century before the intuitu fidei theory appeared.
This mystery the Missouri Synod as well as the entire Synodical Conference
taught in the controversy on the doctrines of conversion and election, and
thus, on the one hand, it upheld the universalis gratia over against Calvinism,
and, on the other hand, it resisted the denial of the sola gratia inherent in the
opposite contention, that conversion and salvation, and therefore also eternal
election, depend not only on God’s grace, but are contingent on the different
conduct and lesser guilt of man. 72
Robert Preus (1924 -1995) took up this topic in a slim volume of 1978, A
Contemporary Look at the Formula of Concord. His observations, though
brief, are worthy of note, particularly in the historical perspective he
provides. He points out that the doctrine of election or predestination was
prominent in Luther’s Bondage of the Will and in the first edition of
Melanchthon’s Loci, not as a central doctrine pertaining to salvation but “as
part of a polemic against freedom of the will”. 73 However, in the intervening
years between those publications and the Formula of Concord, Calvin had
included a section on double predestination in his Institutes, and Beza had
gone even beyond Calvin with his supralapsarian doctrine. 74 Therefore a
clear statement on this teaching was required of the confessors. Preus argues
that FC Articles I and II on the Bondage of the Will and Original Sin must
be considered together with election, and that all are related to the central
doctrine of the Christian religion, justification by faith. 75 So by 1580 election
71 Pieper, 3:499.
72 Pieper, 3:502.
73 Robert Preus, “Predestination and Election,” in Robert D. Preus and Wilbert H. Rosin,
eds, A Contemporary Look at the Formula of Concord (St. Louis: Concordia, 1978), 271.
74 Preus, 272.
75 Preus, 272.