rans whom the rationalist Planck brands as "almost
insane, _beinahe verrueckt,_" were also deposed and banished, 1562.
Strigel's declaration of March, 1562 however, maintaining that "the will
is passive in so far as God alone works all good, but active in so far
as it must be present in its conversion, must consent, and not resist,
but accept," showed that he had not abandoned his synergism. In the same
year he applied for, and accepted, a professorship in Leipzig. Later on
he occupied a chair at the Reformed university in Heidelberg, where he
died 1569, at the age of only forty-five years.

In 1567, when John William became ruler of Ducal Saxony, the Philippists
were dismissed, and the banished Lutheran pastors and professors (with
the exception of Flacius) were recalled and reinstated. While this
rehabilitation of the loyal Lutherans formally ended the synergistic
controversy in Ducal Saxony, occasional echoes of it still lingered, due
especially to the fact that some ministers had considered Strigel's
ambiguous declaration a satisfactory presentation of the Lutheran truth
with regard to the questions involved. That the synergistic teaching of
Melanchthon was continued in Wittenberg appears, for example, from the
_Confessio Wittenbergica_ of 1570.

160. Strigel's Rationalistic Principle.

Although at the opening of the disputation the debaters had agreed to
decide all questions by clear Scripture-passages alone, Strigel's
guiding principle was in reality not the Bible but philosophy and
reason. His real concern was not, What does Scripture teach concerning
the causes of conversion? but, How may we harmonize the universal grace
of God with the fact that only some are converted and saved?
Self-evidently Strigel, too, quoted Bible-passages. Among others, he
appealed to such texts as John 6, 29; Rom. 1, 16; 10, 17; Luke 8, 18;
Heb. 4, 2; Rev. 3, 20; Luke 11, 13; Mark 9, 24; 1 Thess. 2, 13; Jas. 1,
18. But as we shall show later, his deductions were philosophical and
sophistical rather than exegetical and Scriptural. Preger remarks: In
his disputation Strigel was not able to advance a single decisive
passage of Scripture for the presence and cooperation of a good will at
the moment when it is approached and influenced (_ergriffen_) by grace.
(2, 211.) And the clear, irrefutable Bible-texts on which Flacius
founded his doctrine of the inability of natural will to cooperate in
conversion, Strigel endeavored to invalidate b