# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1859_S39
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to the 1859 Volume. 39

theologians who are now regarded as pillars [of the church] has almost entirely vanished. There is scarcely a doctrine of which people do not believe that it stands in need of a better presentation than it has received from our fathers. Even the doctrine of God, of Christ, of the church, of the ministry, of the sacraments, of heaven and hell, and of the last things generally, etc., our Church is said to have hitherto left partly undeveloped, partly presented in a very defective way. A few examples may substantiate our accusation.

Thomasius, in his dogmatics ("The Person and Work of Christ"), aims first of all to reform the doctrine of the whole old Lutheran Church concerning the attributes of God. "We see," he writes at the close of his presentation of the Lutheran dogmaticians' doctrine of the attributes of God, "we see that the older dogmatics leaves it undecided whether the attributes express determinations, or modes of revelation, or merely subjective conceptions of the divine essence."*) I, 42. In order, namely, to clear the way for his own doctrine of the person of Christ, he denies the simplicity of God so excellently demonstrated by our old dogmaticians, and the identity of the divine attributes with the divine essence that follows from it. How essentially Thomasius, together with Delitzsch and Hofmann especially, departs — in the doctrine of the person of Christ — from the pattern of our Church's doctrine, we have already had occasion to document in the October number of this journal's previous volume. The Erlangen theologians, moreover, are so far from standing alone in their supposedly necessary further development of the doctrine of the person of Christ that they are rather following in this an ever more general tendency of the newer so-called believing theology. The United [Church], originally Reformed, Hessian theologian Georg Reich writes in his work "The Further Development of Doctrine" (Hamburg and Gotha, published by Perthes, 1847): "Whereas the Reformed church doctrine has remained content to maintain the duality of the [two] natures side by side without inner mediation, and posits only a nominal communication of each nature's peculiar properties to the person (per alloeosin), the Lutheran [doctrine] has advanced beyond this, to construct a real communication through the transfer of the properties of the one nature to the other (communicatio idiomatum), and has thereby considerably advanced the solution of the task of describing the person of Jesus conceptually according to his inner essence. Yet it too is above all still deficient in this, that it does not carry out this communicatio fully, but only one-sidedly — communicating the properties of the divine nature to the human, indeed, but not likewise, in a restrictive manner, those of

*) It sounds most vexing from the mouth of a Lutheran professor when he, as Thomasius here and elsewhere repeatedly does wherever he believes he must depart from the doctrine of our most enlightened fathers, dismisses them curtly by saying that in this matter they had again followed the Scholastics, without seeing the consequences of such scholastic determinations. Would to God that in our day there were even a single theologian who saw through the organism of Christian doctrines as clearly and as deeply, and who noticed what was being altered as quickly, as whole throngs once did in better days of our Church.