# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1858_S293
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

What Is Now Meant by the Development of the Doctrine of the Luth. Church?                    293

of men; so this distress was, in truth and reality, not his own, so that
as regards his own person he could, at every moment, even more than
Elijah, have been taken up into heaven without death — and yet he made it
so ethically his own at all times that it was his, and he really took it
upon himself and endured it even unto death.

     But I break off here, and remark only further that in your endeavor
to empty out the human nature of Christ entirely into the depth of our
flesh as it then was, I cannot follow you for this reason: that your
conception of the human nature of Christ is naturally not suited to
express, or even further to develop, the ancient churchly doctrine of the
Lutheran Church (of the Reformed Church, that might rather be so). Here
you posit a complete novum. For the nature of Christ, so much in need of
redemption and subject to death, as you present it, is scarcely suited,
according to the ancient churchly system, to lay claim to that twofold
significance according to which it not only had, in general, a purely
human excellence, but was also, through its union with the Logos,
conceived of as participating in the properties of the divine nature in
the state of humiliation. And it is for this reason alone — to demonstrate
that on your premises you cannot arrive at the ancient churchly dogma at
all — that I have touched on this passage at all.

     In § 40 you speak of how church Christology suffers from a chief
defect. "The divine towers, as it were, over the human, as a wide circle
over a narrow one; it goes, in its knowing, living, and working, infinitely
far beyond it, as the extra-historical over the temporal, as the
in-itself-completed over the becoming, as the all-fulfilling and
all-determining over the conditioned. The consciousness that the Son has
of himself and of his universal governance does not coincide as one with
that of the historical Christ; it hovers, as it were, above him. There is
here a twofold mode of sense, a double life, a doubled consciousness, and
so forth." You postulate another subject — and find it. "He, the eternal
Son of God, the second person of the Godhead, has given himself over into
circumscribedness, and thereby into the confines of a spatio-temporal
existence, under the conditions of a human development, into the bounds
of a historical existence, in order, in the fullest sense of the word, to
live through the life of our race in our nature, without thereby ceasing
to be God. He has, in order to realize this, emptied himself — but not of
that which is essential to the Godhead in order to be God; he has, however,
emptied himself of the divine glory that he had from the beginning with
the Father, and that he exercised, ruling and governing, over against the
world. This spatio-temporally limited mode of existence, by virtue of
which he is this man, he has exchanged for its opposite, the being in
heaven with the Father. That is the incarnation. Thus the Logos become man
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 possession of power; he does not exist, anywhere,