# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1858_S294
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

outside the flesh (nec verbum extra carnem nec caro extra verbum),*) he
has, in the totality of his being, become man; his existence and mode of
life are those of a spirit-bodily man, conditioned in space and time. Like
a still, blessed secret, the one become man carries within himself the
heaven from which he came, as a memory of a homeland that he has left and
to which he nonetheless still belongs.'"

     If one asks how this was possible, how the eternal Logos could empty
himself into so limited a human life of memory, you answer with an old
dogmatic distinction of the divine attributes. You distinguish, namely,
between immanent divine attributes and relative ones. The immanent ones
did not hinder the eternal Son of God from becoming man, but only those
which he possessed in his relation to the world. The Logos has retained
the immanent divine attributes of absolute power, truth, holiness, and
love; but he has laid aside the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience,
and omnipresence. Since I begin now with the last point first, allow me
the objection that, in my opinion, this distinction of the divine
attributes will scarcely be able to help us in our question. You maintain,
to be sure, that this distinction must be made, and that without it God
would be made dependent on the world. God is what he is of himself and in
himself; through his relation to the world he gains as little in
essential being of his own as he would lose by it, were he to give it up.
Very well! God can do without the world; but that, together with the loss
of the world, attributes of his — that is, real relations of being —
should also be lost, is, at bottom, nothing other than a mutability of the
divine being. If God does not have omnipotence, omniscience, and
omnipresence without the world, then he does not have them at all. But we
must say: because God lacks the object of the universe, because the world
only comes into being, no series of new attributes comes into being in
God; rather, the being of God remains the same. The immanence of God is
at the same time his relation to the world, only that, so long as the
world is not there, God's relation cannot be there either — not because
God would lack the relative attributes, but because they still belong,
precisely, among the immanent ones. With the world's being created, the
immanence steps outward and becomes relation to the world; but thereby no
change has entered into God, no growth and no diminution of his being.

     It seems to me that here lies the weak point of your system. The
eternal Son of God cannot lay aside omnipotence without absolute power,
he cannot lay aside omniscience without the immanent knowledge; the
eternal Son of God can indeed limit, contract, and draw himself together,
because he wills it, but nevermore renounce a part of his being.

     A man can, by nature, stoop and draw himself together, and for this reason

     *) A proposition which the Christology of the church likewise has, only
in quite another meaning.