# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1862_S12
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

12 A New Teaching on Baptism.

Christ is baptized for this reason, not that he might be sanctified by the water, but that he himself might sanctify the water.

53. Character indelebilis est, quia nunquam scribitur. (Gerh.)

The indelible mark (which the sacraments are supposed to impress upon their recipient) is indelible for this very reason, that it is never written.

(From Dr. Münkel's New Zeitblatt.)

A New Teaching on Baptism.

Such a teaching has already been advanced some years ago by Professor Thomasius of Erlangen, and has now been presented again in the latest volume of his book on the Person and Work of Christ — though, so far as I understand it, still only as an attempt. He starts from the correct and important distinction between man as nature and man as conscious personality. When, for example, things forgotten for years suddenly resurface in our consciousness, where had they been until then? Or when previously unsuspected thoughts flash up in us with peculiar vividness, like lightning striking up out of the depths, where have they come from? Or when in a dream a whole world moves and takes shape within us, one we never thought of while awake, or when the sleepwalker solves the most difficult problems, which had been insoluble to him in his waking consciousness and of which, on waking, he no longer has any knowledge — where does that have its ground? Does one not see that man has a double nature: one, which is his conscious will, his higher free life of the soul; and one, which might be called his natural substrate, over which he himself has no free power, and which yet exercises a great power over him? The ancients say: even if nature is driven out with pitchforks, it always comes back again. That is true, even though it was pagans who said it. Against our psychophysical nature we can do nothing; whatever is laid into our nature in the way of inclinations, sensations, tendencies, and peculiarities asserts itself again and again despite every struggle of our personality against it. And if sin then also fastens itself upon this natural substrate, it produces the sinful bent, the flesh, and becomes all the more dangerous for having become, as it were, a second nature.

These are indisputable facts, and from them Thomasius takes occasion to establish anew the distinct efficacy of the word of God and of the sacraments. He says, namely: the word turns first to our understanding, that is, to our conscious personality, whereas the sacraments, being an action performed upon us, turn to our psychophysical natural substrate. We would then have, for each part, a separate domain of efficacy — only in such a way that one must not separate the domains too strictly, for what happens in our natural substrate naturally benefits our personality as well, and conversely. Yet the efficacy of grace is whole and complete only when