# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1856_S24
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

24 New Literature.

be distinguished, yet in such a way that while the body is of material nature,
soul and spirit are of spiritual nature, or, as he expresses it: soul and spirit are
substantially, though not essentially, different. The explanation and grounding
of this view is found in the author's system, which, so far as the reviewer has
correctly grasped it by running through the apparently principal parts of the
book, is in its main outline as follows. In or upon the triune God a necessary,
eternal revelation of himself is to be distinguished: the doxa. This is what
Scripture means when it calls his garment light, or says that he dwells in a
light unto which no one can approach; this appears in the seven-colored
rainbow which the prophet Ezekiel and John the theologian saw; this unfolds
itself in the seven spirits of whom Isaiah, chapter 11, and John in the
Apocalypse speak. Now man is the image of God, and everything created has
its prototype in God. So there is also in man something corresponding to the
triune God and to the doxa: the former is the spirit, the latter the soul. As to
which faculties make up the spirit, we may not, on the one hand, seek to
determine this by way of empirical investigation, since we would thereby
abandon the purpose of a biblical psychology; on the other hand, we cannot
determine it from the relevant biblical expressions, since these at most contain
hints toward an answer that must be obtained from elsewhere. This we gain,
then, from an investigation of what takes place within God's being in such a
way that the holy Trinity results from it, namely from the begetting of the
Son by the Father and the procession of the Holy Spirit from both. The
fundamental activities that appear therein are willing, thinking, and feeling in
general, which the author hopes to make still more vivid by means of the
following "figurative representation of the trinitarian process": "he would
paint a fiery circle as an emblem of the fiery will of love of the Father, and
within this circle a sunlit center as an emblem of the Son, of the goal of love
that illumines the whole infinite depth of the divine being of love, and,
proceeding from this sunlit center out to the periphery of the fiery circle, a
fullness of rays as an emblem of the triumph of love that goes forth from the
Father through the Son and fills both Father and Son." Corresponding to
these fundamental activities that take place within the being of God are, in
the human spirit: free will, reason, and disposition (nus, logos, pneuma).
As to which faculties make up the soul, this results from an understanding of
the doxa, or of the seven spirits in which it unfolds itself. To this
understanding we arrive, however, partly and provisionally from the
description of the appearance of the doxa in Scripture, according to which
fire breaks forth out of darkness and light out of fire, and partly and
conclusively from the trinitarian process explained above. Accordingly the
first three spirits, or powers, correspond to the activity of the Father, the
fourth to that of the Son, and finally the last three to that of the Holy Spirit;
the first is a power of self-contraction within itself (a will having no object
but itself); the second, a power of the