# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1858_S239
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Professors Thomasius, Harnack, and Delitzsch, against von Hofmann. 239

the case to such a degree that unfavor must necessarily result for the "scriptural proof" from this quarter, where the check upon it is so easy. One must lose confidence in an interpreter who can so pervert the most palpable of things. Scripture, properly speaking, needs no refutation, though such a one, we hear, is being prepared; it carries its own refutation within itself.

Dr. von Hofmann, in this second installment of the Schutzschriften, and likewise in the second edition of the Schriftbeweis, has seemingly drawn closer to a considerable degree to the biblical and churchly doctrine. He now speaks much of the wrath of God, which Christ is supposed to have borne for love of us. But the approach is only an apparent one, and thus a confusing one, so that in truth what we have is not so much a step forward as rather a step backward. The wrath of God, of which v. H. speaks, does not belong to the matter at hand. It comes into consideration only as the cause of the evil in the world, into whose fellowship Christ willingly entered, and is only a designation of this evil itself according to its supernatural causality. Of a vicarious suffering of the wrath, v. H. will still, now as before, know nothing. He still maintains even now: "that the punishment of our sin having been carried out upon him instead of upon us is a self-made mystery." (p. 106) He says it plainly: (p. 103) "Between the placing of the eternal Son of God under a carrying-out of the divine judgment of wrath against mankind, accomplished upon him in a representative manner, there remains the very essential (to be sure!) difference, that it is not the Son who is the object of the wrath of God the Father, even if only in a representative way, but rather mankind; and that it was not the punishment, to which unredeemed mankind would forever have fallen prey, that was carried out upon the Son, but rather that his office as Savior became for him the cause of all the sufferings which he, in consequence of his coming into Adamic mankind, brought upon himself with it. Not him, instead of us,

In the 3rd article of the Augsburg Confession it is said of Christ that he died "that he might be a sacrifice not only for original sin, but also for all other sin, and might reconcile God's wrath." In Article 4 it is said that our sins are forgiven us for Christ's sake, who through his death made full satisfaction for our sins, qui sua morte pro peccatis nostris satisfecit. In the section on the abuses, the suffering of Christ is called a satisfaction, not only for the guilt of original sin, but also for all remaining sins. In the 4th article of the Apology, Christ's blood and merit are called the treasure by which sin is paid for. In the same place it is said: "Far above our purity, indeed far above the Law itself, must the death of Christ and the satisfaction granted us by him be set, so that we may accept that we have, on account of that satisfaction, a gracious God, not on account of our fulfilling of the Law." Luther says: "This must help us, that the man Jesus Christ has come and has taken upon himself and borne our sin and death, which we had rightly deserved through and through

— he has stepped into our place and has let the Law, sin, and death, on our behalf, fall upon him." Elsewhere: "As far as his own person is concerned he was righteous and without any sin; but because he took upon himself the sin of others, he became a sinner." Elsewhere: "He is both in one person, the highest, greatest, and only sinner, and the highest, greatest, and only righteousness."