# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1860_S77
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Dr. v. Hofmann's Doctrine of the Fall. 77

biting of the apple, that is, with the desire for an earthly, worldly good, that from this point he arrives at a total overturning of the churchly views concerning sin and its origin. Man, says v. Hofmann, stood in his relation to God indifferent. Now, however, God set apart one of the trees of the garden, which He had given him for enjoyment, from the rest. In doing so God erected for man a boundary of his God-imaged relation to the world: man was appointed to be lord of the earth, as God is Lord of the world as a whole, and this relation of lordship received a boundary at the tree that had been set apart. To this boundary Satan's cunning now attached itself; he taught man to feel it as a boundary, and represented to him that he would extend his relation of lordship over the world and become more like God, if he would leap over this boundary; and man did so. Thus it came about that sin, as the desiring of a thing belonging to the corporeal world, began within the sphere of man's relation to the world. And this has been of the weightiest consequences. Had sin begun in this way — that man, in his relation to God, determined himself against God, setting his will directly against the will of God — then sin would have begun as enmity against God, and man would then have had to die, and could not have been spared for grace. As it is, however, sin did not begin so, but rather in this way: that man wrongly determined himself in his relation to the world; it was not his concern to deny God's will, he merely wanted to have one more earthly good, merely to extend his dominion over the world. To be sure, a direction was thereby taken which, in its further course, was bound to bring man to enmity against God, to a conscious setting of his will against God's will. But this was precisely not the beginning, but the result of the further development within sin. Only when God then confronted sinful man with the grace that sought his conversion, expressly declared His will to him in the Law, and came to meet him personally in His Son — only then did sin become enmity against God, in the case of those who rejected God in disobedience and unbelief. The beginning, by contrast, was merely that man craved one more corporeal thing; and that was not so bad that God could not have let man go on living and have reserved him for a grace. That is v. Hofmann's hamartiogony. It is now not difficult to demonstrate the error on which it rests. We need not go into the artifices by which v. Hofmann (compare, for instance, what he says at II, 349, on Romans 5:10) tries to rid himself of the scriptural expressions that stand against him; the counter-proof, to which every human conscience must say Yes, lies before us in the history of the Fall itself. To be sure, the first act of sin did indeed occur within man's relation to the corporeal world, as the desiring of its good. But this good was forbidden to man, forbidden by the expressly declared will of God. Before man, then, could crave and reach for this good, he had first