# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1858_S295
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

What Is Now Understood by the Further Development of the Doctrine of the Lutheran Church?     295

he remains nonetheless a complete man. But were he to cut off his hands and feet and say, through them I stood in relation to the world, and now without them no longer, and yet am still a man, one would have to tell him: a man you are, but a crippled one. We shall therefore have to stand by the statement of the Formula of Concord: "quantum ergo ad divinam in Christo naturam attinet, cum in ipso nulla sit, ut Jacobus testatur 1, 17, transmutatio divinae Christi naturae, per incarnationem nihil quoad essentiam et proprietates ejus vel accessit, vel decessit, et per eam in se vel per se neque diminuta neque aucta est." [So far as concerns the divine nature in Christ, since in it there is, as James testifies (1:17), no transmutation of the divine nature of Christ whatsoever, through the incarnation nothing accrued to or was lost from its essence and properties, nor was it in itself or through itself either diminished or increased. But if it follows from what has been said that the doctrine of the immanent and relative attributes is the weak point of your system, at which one will in the long run be able neither to remain nor to wish to remain, because its consequence, unless it forces itself back to the full churchly system, will call forth a new Gnosticism*), which will either indulge itself in ever stranger results or finally end again in pantheistic and ordinary rationalism — then I must further remind you that besides the weak point of the dialectic there is here a far more dangerous point that must be kept in view for the whole doctrine of salvation.

For if the Logos has laid aside omniscience and, despite his divine knowledge, has above all become a true and indeed a man in need of redemption, then he must also, as is the way of man, as God-man not only have been able to sleep and not know, but also to forget. Now picture to yourself your God-man as Redeemer of the world: how he not only slept and died, but also failed to know much and again forgot much that he had known. How is it even possible that this twice-depotentiated God-man, depotentiated as God and depotentiated as man, could even have willed to redeem mankind — let alone have been able to accomplish and carry it out! To eternal justice this depotentiated God-man could by no means make sufficient satisfaction! Apart from the fact that the possibility must always be reckoned with in his case that he might also have sinned — for your system never arrives at the churchly non posse peccare — the offering that he brought to the Father for the infinite guilt of men was accordingly not an infinite one, but a limited and finite one, just as his person was. In your system the whole accent falls upon the limitedness and finitude of the God-man who is depotentiated both as God and as man: so that all his doing and suffering could not express the unlimited satisfaction that the unlimited guilt of man-

*) One need only consider such sentences as are found in Gess, the most recent Christologian, who works along the same line on which almost all modern Christologians move, in his "Doctrine of the Person of Christ": "The eternal outflowing of the glorious divine life of the Son from the Father is, for the time of the earthly humiliation of the Son, brought to a standstill; for that very reason the Son cannot, during that same time, be the fountain of life from which the Holy Spirit flows forth. Brought to a standstill in this time is also the subsistence of the world in the Son, the preservation and government of the same through the Son." p. 389.