# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1859_S104
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

104 On the Language of the Church.

...limited itself for the sake of the work of redemption. — Christ, in the state of humiliation, had not yet possessed omniscience. — Christ's humanity received the divine attributes with the state of exaltation. — Christ, by his holy life and innocent suffering and death, earned the exaltation. — Christ, insofar as he was a man, was obligated to fulfill the Law. — Christ could also have sinned or fallen into sin, but he was not willing to. — Christ, according to the human nature, is omnipotence. — Christ's humanity is God. — Christ, already in the state of humiliation, was present to all creatures and ruled, sitting at the right hand of God, over heaven and earth, just as in the state of exaltation, only with this difference, that he kept or concealed this majesty secretly. — The divine attributes, with the incarnation of the Son of God, became essential attributes of the human nature of Christ, and this human nature became equal to the divine.

Prayer, the ministry, the church, penance, watchfulness, etc., are means of grace.

Baptism is not necessary for salvation. — Baptism is unconditionally and absolutely necessary for salvation. — Whoever has broken the covenant of baptism, and so lost the grace of baptism, must save himself, instead of by baptism, upon the plank of penance.

Bread and wine in the Holy Supper are pledges and assurances that one is made partaker of the body and blood of Christ.

Hypocrites and the godless also belong to the church. —

With most of these expressions a teacher may possibly connect a tolerable sense.**) But they are, one and all, unchurchly ways of speaking, not conformed to the pattern of sound words, of which the same holds true that Augustine wrote of him who wished to use the word "fatum" [fate] in an acceptable sense: "Mentem teneat, linguam corrigat" — that is, well then, let him keep the right meaning, and amend the expression. (De civitate Dei, book 5, ch. 1.)

**) Such expressions as are peculiar to the Rationalists — the teaching of Jesus, the religion of Jesus, the Sage of Nazareth, to walk the path of virtue, we ought to be virtuous people, virtue is the life of the soul, an upright man, noble pride, a man of principle, and so forth — we do not believe need any mention here. Just as little the expressions of the "heavenly prophets," a Carlstadt, a Münzer, and others, who used, for example, the following words to designate the stages by which one ascends to the true knowledge of God: 1. Coarsening-away [Entgröbung]. 2. Studying. 3. Wonderment. 4. Boredom. 5. Besprinkling. (Compare Gerhard's loc. de minist. § 251.) It would, finally, also be a fruitless labor to attempt to name all the unchurchly ways of speaking with which the theological works of the present day teem; they testify almost without exception to a revolution in the domain of the language of the church that recalls the Babylonian confusion of tongues. Apart from the errors underlying this newer, monstrous language, the trite saying holds true of most of it: Si non vis intelligi, non debes legi — he who will not write clearly and so as not to be misunderstood does not deserve to be read.