# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1858_S297
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

What Is Now Understood by the Further Development of the Doctrine of the Lutheran Church?     297

which you wish to remove by a salto mortale of the Logos, that very thing you let back in fully over this makeshift bridge, in that, by the help of the Holy Spirit, you nevertheless help the God-man, humbled in the world, back to his trinitarian glory.*) So in the end he gets back all the glory he had laid aside after all! Or does the Holy Spirit likewise lay aside his omnipotence and become depotentiated as well, in uniting himself with the humbled God-man? But then it is not only the Logos that has humbled himself, but the Holy Spirit as well. If that is not the case, and the Holy Spirit, in giving himself to the God-man, remains unrestricted in all his divine properties even in the humiliation, what relation then arises? The Son has laid aside the Doxa, but not the Holy Spirit dwelling within him, who, since he dwells in the God-man in a twofold way — by nature and by office — nevertheless communicates it to him.†) But you will not wish to grant that, since otherwise the whole system would acquire a serious gap in favor of the churchly system. So nothing remains but that the Holy Spirit performs his office toward the humbled Logos in such a way — how, admittedly, is not to be seen — that the Logos, despite the communication of the Holy Spirit, remains as lowly as you have made him out to be. Then, to be sure, it becomes serious indeed with the other side of your system, according to which the Logos now exists only in the humbled Son of God. But then something utterly incomprehensible has come about. The trinitarian unity is dissolved. The two persons in the Godhead have lost their point of unity; the one person is no longer among them in heaven, but dwells instead on earth, speaks, acts, and lives like a man among men, and has — apart, to be sure, from sin — fallen under the power of death and become in need of redemption! Is that not against all the reason of Scripture? Or is it supposed to be possible simply because God willed it out of love for mankind? Well, if you ask that of us, then you may also not attack the scandalum that the churchly system justly claims for itself, with its twofold humanity and its Logos who lies in the manger and at the same time pervades and governs the universe. I find that whatever vulnerable point the churchly system may have is amply found again in the Charybdis of your own. For once I am willing to grant that to you the

*) The Reformed Church (see Schneckenburger, Comparative Presentation of the Lutheran and Reformed Doctrinal System, vol. II, p. 195) needed the Holy Spirit as a bond between the humanity and the divine nature of the Logos. For the Reformed Church human nature is non capax infiniti [not capable of the infinite]; it needs the Holy Spirit as a mediation between the human and the divine nature. According to Thomasius's view the Logos is no longer capax infiniti [capable of the infinite]; for that he needs the Holy Spirit. That is substantially a Reformed idea, for whether the incapacity for the infinite befalls the human or the divine nature makes no difference; the defect lies precisely in the incapacity itself. And if I had to choose, I would rather choose the old Reformed incapacity of the human nature than the Thomasian incapacity of the Logos.

†) Would it not be preferable to say at once, with Coccejus, that the πνεῦμα ἅγιον [Holy Spirit] of Matt. 1 and Luke [1] is the persona filii Dei [person of the Son of God]?