# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1858_S298
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

-person-formation of the God-man has succeeded, but what have you, while making peace on earth, meanwhile wrought in heaven? God and man you have united, but the Godhead you have torn apart; on earth and into reason you have brought peace, but into heaven, war. If, on your theory, the unity of person in the God-man can be established at all, why then do you insist so firmly that the Logos laid aside his glory, and that beyond the one miracle — namely the incarnation, which Scripture teaches and the church confesses, and which we, even if we cannot comprehend it, can nevertheless defend — he must have performed a second miracle as well and robbed himself of his own divine essence? If the Logos was capable of the first miracle, he was nevertheless never capable of the second. Therefore we must teach it either wholly or not at all. A Lutheran theologian should not so hastily sidestep the objections raised — that this opens the door to Nestorianism or Eutychianism, or else that the Redeemer becomes an altogether unthinkable being. On this proposition Lutheran theology must stand inviolably firm: if God became man, he must have become so wholly. It is merely a concession to the spirit of the age's science when this miracle is praised as a miracle only by scientifically stripping it once more of its glory. One can surely explain this in no other way than that one shrinks from the propositions which the ancient church pronounced with the greatest candor: namely, that the child in the manger and the man on the cross govern the world. So long as we cannot overcome this foolishness of the Gospel, so long, to be sure, will we always prefer to postulate, in the name of science, a more humanistically graspable and finished personality of the God-man.

In my opinion, in our dogmatic developments and, respectively, further-developments, we must not sink beneath the level of the churchly thought; otherwise there are no further-developments at all, but only ruptures. Every departure from the principal foundations of the churchly system of doctrine must lead to malformations, or else the church has tormented itself and others with malformations. Tertium non datur [there is no third possibility]. But whether we shall ever in this life be able to penetrate more deeply into the mystery than Brenz and Chemnitz did as theologians, and Nicolai as a practical divine — the differences between these and other theologians are, set against the abysses of modern Christology, to be regarded as nothing but interesting variations — that must remain an open question until, in continuity with history, we see a provisional conclusion and not a break. Just as Paul, in 1 Timothy 3:16, calls the mystery of the incarnation of Christ "confessedly great" (ὁμολογουμένως μέγα), so the church has done likewise at all times. Chemnitz has an entire chapter in his book de duabus naturis in Christo [On the Two Natures in Christ] on the point that this mystery cannot be searched out. There golden sayings are found from Justin, Origen, Athanasius, Cyril, and others besides. Chrysostom says there: "I know that the Word was made flesh, and how it was made,