# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1858_S240
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

the wrath of God has fallen, so that the punishment is now accomplished and no longer needs to be accomplished, but rather the evils in which God's wrath against sinful mankind is accomplished, he suffered in the manner appointed with his office as Savior." It was not for us that Christ endured the wrath of God, but alongside us, and indeed in such a way that the wrath remains continually upon us until we turn it away from ourselves by our own act.

It is confusing when v. H., right at the beginning of his writing, says: the question is not whether, but rather in what way the world's sin is atoned for in Christ. The radical contradiction concerning the How strikes at the same time the That. Von Hofmann's conception of the reconciliation is separated by no firm boundary from the ordinary rationalistic one, from Christ as the pious sufferer, the ideal of a disposition well-pleasing to God, the model of virtue whom we are to emulate, and must in the long run, despite the lofty phrases, inevitably sink down to that level. No bridge leads over from Christ to us; he did everything, in the first instance, only for himself; we ourselves must build the bridge by entering into the disposition that drove him to such a proving of himself. Whether this proving of himself was the highest conceivable one may well be questioned. If Christ's suffering had no vicarious character, if the whole point was only "that he prove himself, amid all that God's wrath against sin brings with it, as the Holy One," then a long life of painful sickness would have been, then for example leprosy would have been, a truer proving of himself than the painful but swift death — as surely as the head of a man afflicted with leprosy, in the physician Schilling's monograph de lepra, rightly bears the inscription: horridior morte, more horrifying than death. The source of the rationalistic doctrine of reconciliation is a superficial way of regarding sin. The beginnings of such a view already appear in v. H. too. He says: (p. 98) "Satanic sin is the negation of the divine will absolutely, because it is the divine will; human sin, however, is an ungodly desiring of a supposed good. — God can convince men that the good of their desiring is no good at all, whereby he makes room for the recognition that he alone is worthy of love." If sin sits only on the surface, then conviction, mere instruction, suffices. If one could, as H. does, cut between Satanic sin and human sin as with a knife, then everything would be called into question that Scripture says about the communication between Satanic sin and human sin: when Satan casts thoughts into the heart, when he enters into a man, when he sows evil seed, when sinners have the devil for their "father" and do after their father's desire, then there must necessarily exist between human sin and Satanic sin a dreadful connection."

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