# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1859_S40
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

40 Preface to the 1859 Volume.

those [properties] of the latter — [as] he who knows this well, [sees] that here too the divine side still claims an undue preponderance. (!) At this point the dogma of the further development of doctrine we are to describe is now taken up." (p. 40.) One sees from this that the Reformed, Nestorian doctrine of the person of Christ is meant to pass through the Lutheran in such a way that it comes out the other side worse off than before. When, accordingly, Ebrard, in Herzog's Real-Encyclopedia, under the title "Jesus Christ the God-Man," writes*): "That the Logos himself personally became man, that he lowered himself to the mode of existence of an embryonic child-soul, that he, in whom all the fullness of the Godhead dwelt in the form of eternal presence, reduced himself (!) to a being in whom that fullness lay in the form of a developing seed — that he became a child-soul, a germinating, human center of life, and as such entered into the human mother's womb, into the germ cell, and out of earthly bodily matter formed for himself a body — at first an ensouled fiber, which developed into a body — and ensouled it and let it grow up into a body — this is the truth which was equally misapprehended by both of those erroneous views. As soon as that truth is grasped and held fast, one cannot possibly arrive at the absurd proposition that the Logos united himself with a man, the Son of God with a son of Mary" — and when, furthermore, on the strength of this theory Ebrard does not hesitate to acknowledge a communicatio idiomatum that is "not verbal" — then the praise which Ebrard, at the close of his article, pays to the Erlangen theologians can only grieve us deeply, as a disgrace weighing upon the Lutheran Church of our day. For Ebrard concludes as follows: "The newer Lutheran theology, particularly that of the Erlangen school, has made a serious and commendable attempt to overcome that view taken over from medieval Scholasticism. Dr. Thomasius was the first, in 1845 (Zeitschrift für Protestantismus und Kirche, issue 2), to venture the view that the Logos, in the state of humiliation, limited himself and thus, as it were, took on the properties of human nature. At any rate, the Logos thus limited is supposed to have then united himself with a "'human nature'" in the concrete sense. In the state of exaltation, the divine nature is supposed to have taken back its divine properties, and to have communicated these also to the human nature. The view of the two natures as two components was here still retained, but a first beginning had nevertheless been made toward acknowledging the untenability of the Lutheran scholasticism of 1577 (the Formula of Concord). Far more vigorously, on the other hand, Dr. Hofmann has recently carried through, in his "'Scripture-Proof,'" the doctrine that the Logos became man. The manner of Hofmann's presentation (that the Son of God "'ceased to be God, in order to'"

*) We have here given only what Ebrard himself gives in letter-spaced type.