#human powers

Just as people who are bodily dead cannot on the basis of their own powers prepare themselves or dispose themselves to receive temporal life once again, so people who are spiritually dead in sins cannot on the basis of their own strength dispose themselves or turn themselves toward appropriate spiritual, heavenly righteousness and life, if the Son of God has not made them alive and freed them from the death of sin.

For, first of all, even though human reason or natural intellect may still have a dim spark of knowledge that a god exists (as Romans 1[:19-21, 24, 32] states) or of the teaching of the law, nevertheless it is ignorant, blind, and perverted so that even when the most skillful and learned people on earth read or hear the gospel of God’s Son and the promise of eternal salvation, they still cannot comprehend, grasp, understand, or believe it on the basis of their own powers; they cannot regard it as the truth. Instead, the more assiduously and diligently they exert themselves and want to comprehend these spiritual matters with their reason, the less they understand or believe. They regard all these matters as simply foolishness and fables, until the Holy Spirit enlightens and teaches them.

Instead, the chief question is, purely and simply, what the mind and will of the unregenerated human being are able to do in conversion and rebirth on the basis of their own powers that remain after the fall, when God’s Word is proclaimed and God’s grace is offered us. Can people prepare themselves for this grace and accept it, giving their “yes” to it? This is the question concerning which some theologians argued for many years in the churches of the Augsburg Confession.