# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1858_S290
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

290                    What Is Now Meant by the Development of the Doctrine of the Luth. Church?

pass over into it, thus requiring that the infinite Logos-consciousness
become a finite human one. If church doctrine rightly derives Christ's
self-consciousness not from the human nature but from the Logos-nature,
then it must still take the step (!) of assuming a finitizing of the
Logos-consciousness, in order to gain a human consciousness for the human
nature" — so the only question here is whether that is spoken more
according to your system or perhaps according to that of Hofmann.*) More
recently, Delitzsch too has come over to your view. After he had already,
in his biblical-prophetic theology, p. 249, with reference to your
contribution to church Christology in Harless's journal, 1845, vol. I,
p. 29, maintained that the deeper grounding of the concept of personality,
and at the same time of the organic, had been reserved for more recent
times, he has now fully declared himself, in his biblical psychology, for
the view represented by you. He says there, p. 283: "The Redeemer is not
in possession of the eternal Doxa, for he longs to return to it, John
17:5. He is not omniscient, for he does not know, as he himself says, the
day and hour of the end, Mark 13:32. He is not omnipotent, for all power
is, as the Risen One says, given to him, Matt. 28:18. He is not
omnipresent, for in order to fill all things he ascended, Eph. 4:10. It
must therefore be shown how the Logos could truly and actually give up the
eternal Doxa and these attributes of his divine mode of being, without yet
giving up his divine being, of which the Doxa is the image and of which
those attributes are the energy." It seems to me that you will be
satisfied with this conception of Delitzsch's. What the dogmatician has
found, the psychologist accepts in agreement.

     It might stand quite otherwise with another of your colleagues.
Although you indeed follow the exegesis of Prof. Hofmann in this
Christological question almost everywhere, I cannot believe that you
also unconditionally subscribe to Hofmann's dogmatic propositions.

     According to Hofmann, the deity of the Logos has, in the man Jesus in
the state of his humiliation, wholly vanished; his self-activity is a
purely human one; there is no talk of any kind of being of the Christ
who is on earth in heaven — he has given himself up entirely and without
reservation of all otherworldly self-manifestation. On the one shore of
eternity the Logos appears, dives down into humanity and vanishes within
it, until he emerges again on the other shore of eternity. In the
Schriftbeweis II.1, p. 28, it says: "Because he had been with God before
he became man, he, the one become man, is υἱὸς θεοῦ (son of God) in the
exclusive sense, and thus θεός (God), but θεός in the world as man, after
having previously been so in an otherworldly way with God. Conversely, in
his resurrection and transfiguration he has become God, not merely in
that he was recognized as such, but

     *) Dorner rightly shows, it seems to me, (Jahrbücher 1856, vol. I,
book II) that Hofmann's conception of his finite and mutable God, even if
mutable by force of his will, belongs to the domain of Arianism.