# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1858_S292
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

for your system. You say that the Logos did not appropriate the human
nature to himself as it was before the fall in the first Adam, in its
original goodness and health, but rather as it became in consequence of
the fall, in the weakness, liability to suffering, and susceptibility to
temptation of its present state: our fallen nature, subject to the power
of death, accessible to the influences of the evil one, sensual and in
need of redemption, called "flesh" by Scripture — this, you say, he
assumed. That Christ's human nature is called "flesh" in Scripture is
indeed correct, but the question is whether Scripture means by this that
Christ assumed the human nature that is subject to the power of death and
in need of redemption. You strip the Logos, as far as you are able, of
his divine properties, and are still not satisfied even with that: you
press him down so far into the depth of that human nature of his time that
he ceases to be the mediator between God and men. I well know that the
dogmaticians speak of infirmitates hominum naturales communes, e.g.
esurire, sitire, defatigari, algere, æstuare, dolere, indignari, turbari,
lacrimari — infirmities which, since they are blameless, Christ, as
Scripture testifies, took upon himself; but they also speak of infirmitates
personales, which are farthest removed from the most holy humanity of
Christ, since it was neither expedient for mankind nor consonant with
human dignity that they be assumed. You do not seem to have observed this
canon precisely. Can you really conceive of a Christ who himself had a
nature subject to the power of death and in need of redemption, and yet
redeemed others? Who, then, first redeemed him from his own "nature in
need of redemption"?*) In himself he had freedom, both from death and
from the need of redemption, but nonetheless he participated, through his
constant willing, in the guilt and punishment of mankind coming upon him
from without, in that he took it upon himself and endured it so
objectively and really.

     From without, the fallen man came upon him, as did the fallen angel
and the fallen earth, and he had to suffer really with all the assaults of
the fallen creation, as finally also the external death, which likewise
did not arise out of himself but came upon him from without; but at every
moment he stood, as regards his own person, sinless, and thus also free
of guilt and free of death, and all the sin, guilt, and death that befell
him he had only to bear, as the distress of his brothers, through his
truthful and real συμπαθῆσαι (com-passion).

     By nature he was a true man, but this does not entail the power of
death and the need of redemption — on the contrary, it entails rather
holiness and freedom from death. According to his historical existence,
however, he took part, through his real sympathy, in the distress of

     *) There is, concerning the Thomasian proposition of the need of
redemption in Christ, a variously mystical turn, according to which the
historical Christ, even if only as a determination of nature and as a
vanishing moment, also had sin — a thing not in fact excluded as
impossible. That other Christian men, too, can arrive at such ideas is
attested by Menken and Irving.