# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1858_S291
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

What Is Now Meant by the Development of the Doctrine of the Luth. Church?                    291

in that the one who became man became again what he had ceased to be in
his incarnation." Before I go further, I must not fail first to set out
your system in brief outline, so far as is useful here.

     The Logos took to himself the real, but sinless, human nature, not,
however, as it was before the fall, but as it became in consequence of the
fall, in its weakness: our fallen nature, subject to the power of death and
in need of redemption, called "flesh" by Scripture, is what the Logos
took on; the incarnation of the Logos was thus neither an absolutely new
creation, nor an appropriation of sinful flesh. But the Logos had to limit
himself if he wished to take human nature to himself. We, you say,
postulate a subject as God-man, which can only have come into being
through God himself determining upon a real participation in the human
form of life and consciousness; the Logos must accordingly, in order fully
to accomplish the incarnation, renounce his divine glory and yet remain in
an essential Godhood within the assumed humanity. God thus becomes a
human "I," humanly determined in his consciousness and life; he becomes
the "I" of a complete, spirit-bodily nature wholly homogeneous with our
own. The divine "I" becomes a human "I"; a God-human personality comes
about through this, that it, as a divine "I," has taken up the human
nature into itself and joined itself with it into the God-man. The Son of
God has not reserved for himself, outside the human kind assumed by him,
any special being-for-himself, any special consciousness, any special
sphere of action or seat of power; he does not exist, anywhere, outside
the flesh. The Logos has thus become totally man and takes wholly the
place of the spirit in the one born again, within his own sinless
creatureliness. The life of the God-man in his humiliation is, in part, a
constant revelation of the immanent divine attributes — of absolute
power, truth, holiness, and love. As is his word, so also is his whole
self-attestation, indeed his very appearing, a manifestation of the
essential communion in which he stands with God. But just as much is his
humiliation a continuous self-emptying. As he has possessed the immanent
divine attributes, so he has not possessed the relative attributes of
God: omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.

     As much as is fitting for my purpose, I have compiled your doctrine
mostly in your own words. The first thing now that seems important to me
in your view, and that hangs closely together with your whole conception,
is your doctrine of the human nature of Christ in his humiliation. That
you present Christ as sinless is of course in accordance with Scripture;
but that you, although he is the second Adam, nevertheless press him
down, as far as is at all possible, from this his plastic standing to the
level of the fallen Adam, seems to me just as contrary to Scripture as it
is useless