# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1859_S42
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

42 Preface to the 1859 Volume.

work) — the doctrine of Christ's descent into hell, [by] J. L. König — does the Formula of Concord's presentation an injustice, without doubt, when, to supplement it, he calls in the aid of the often-mentioned sermon of Luther's; by which we certainly do not mean to say that the doctrinal development in question is everywhere the fitting one; it demands, rather, a deeper and clearer one ... Without doubt every great age in the kingdom of God has one or more sides of the whole Christian body of doctrine to develop in a preeminent sense: this has been remarked as often as it has been fully confirmed by history. The heretical elements themselves, which the Church has to combat, as well as her own innermost consciousness, then drive everything toward this central point. Such a one is given to the present great age in the kingdom of God with the doctrine of the Church, as well as with that of the last things ... It cannot be denied that no doctrine, probably, lies further from the faith-consciousness of our time than that of Hades and the descent of the Lord into hell; so nothing, perhaps, might lead more directly to the goal than to show how this whole doctrine is just as necessarily woven into the whole economy of evangelical history as an indispensable link in the whole of the Christian faith, so that it bears up the other links no less than it is borne up by them.*) We need only recall Christ's comforting promise to the penitent thief (Luke 23:43) to see at once that the commonly opposed notion, of the various dead arriving immediately at consummated blessedness, at the vision of God, is the least tenable of all; for were it so, then beyond dispute the Prince of Life, as soon as he had, breathing his last, commended his soul into the hands of the Father, would not have gone to that place in the lower parts of the earth (εἰς τὰ κατώτερα μέρη τῆς γῆς, Eph. 4:9), but would have gone straight into heaven ... There is so little room for any doubt that the paradise into which the devout thief came is that very place to which the Lord went**) that, on the contrary, in the opposite case the Lord's word would contradict his deed, or his deed his word, while in either case his prophecy of his three-day and nightly abiding "'in the heart of the earth'" (ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ τῆς γῆς, Matt. 12:40), after the pattern that had come to pass in the prophet Jonah, would be brought to nothing. So we surely do not err if, on the one hand, we conclude that here too, as in death, the Lord was made like his brethren, yet in such a way that even in this he was the Lord

*) One sees from this that what is at stake here is not a theological problem that could be disputed pro et contra, but an article of faith in the proper sense of the word, which only now, in this "great age," is being drawn out into the light of day and is to be cleansed of its dross. D. R.

**) "So too Abraham's bosom, in the parable of the rich man and poor Lazarus (Luke 16:22), finds its most satisfying clarification." (Rudelbach.) According to R., then, Christ's descent into hell is the journey into paradise and into Abraham's bosom! That is doctrinal development!