# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1859_S41
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to the 1859 Volume. 41

become man'") is a crooked expression, going beyond due measure (for it was not being God that he ceased to be, but only the μορφῇ θεοῦ [the divine form, Phil. 2:6] that he gave up). — It may well be the most essential task of the theology of our time to rectify the doctrine of the God-man." So we see, then, once again, that Luther is right when he declares that at all times the article concerning Christ is the chief stumbling-block for human reason, and that all false teachers take their start here. Satan well sees that he must not renew, in its old form, his war against Christ, God and man united in one person, if he wishes to ensnare the few believers still left in this last age; hence he now comes stealing along under the cloak of a supposedly necessary "further development" of the old doctrine, hoping in this way to talk unwary Christians into a "believing"-trimmed Arianism and to coax their Christ away from them with fine words.

A further sad proof that the consciousness that the Lutheran Church truly possesses the mark of pure preaching has died out in the theologians who now stand as the coryphaei of Lutheranism is supplied by Dr. Rudelbach. Without repeating other matter already mentioned on an earlier occasion, we recall only an essay by the aforementioned highly renowned theologian in the fourth quarterly number of his "Zeitschrift" for 1842. There it says, among other things, as follows: "At the Reformation it was indeed so entirely a matter of the innermost hearth of the Christian conscience, the center and root of the Gospel, that many other questions all the more had to be left aside, since otherwise the struggle could not have been rightly waged pro aris et focis (for altar and hearth). Only what, throughout the whole of dogmatics, brought the doctrine of justification back into application, or what necessarily connected with it, or wherein Pelagianism had been smuggled in so as to sell its tinsel gold as the genuine article, could and had to become the object of closer investigation. Thus men fought against purgatory, and rightly so, because it placed Christ's merit in the shade and endangered the fundamental concept of atonement in his death; but with the removal of this notion, the article of faith concerning the intermediate state in general, and the abode of souls until the general resurrection — for which Holy Scripture undeniably bears witness — was pushed aside more or less indifferently. Thus it came about that the article in the Symbol, "'descended into hell,'" did not, in part even within the Lutheran Church, receive as complete a treatment as others, and least of all the fitting doctrinal development*)... The author (of the

*) Here Rudelbach inserts a number of scattered utterances of Luther, Mathesius, Rhegius, Lucas Osiander, and Schlüsselburg, which contain the well-known hypothesis, offered to explain 1 Pet. 3:19-20, that either all souls, or at least those overtaken by the Flood, were in an intermediate state up until Christ's accomplished sacrificial death; a hypothesis which Rudelbach then, without the slightest warrant, exploits for his own doctrine of a Hades as an intermediate place even after Christ's sacrificial death.