# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1859_S162
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

162 On the Teaching of the Newest Theology Concerning the Person of Christ, etc.

the other chief articles of the whole body of doctrine, once the consistent development takes its natural course. It is therefore a particularly distressing phenomenon that precisely in the doctrine of the Person of Christ, and indeed in the article concerning the state of his humiliation, an old error, raised up by Zwingli, Zanchi, and other Reformed and Philippist theologians, has found entry among many believing theologians in Germany, among whom there are even Lutherans. In what follows the false doctrine shall be presented, as far as possible, in the very words of the theologians concerned, in their context; then the pure doctrine of Holy Scripture shall be set against it; and finally the testimony of the oldest church for the pure doctrine shall be adduced in some clear and definite statements of respected church teachers of antiquity.

In presenting the newly revived false doctrine of the humiliation of Christ I shall begin with Thomasius, who first raised it up among the Lutheran theologians of our day and procured its spread. He already developed his view in 1845 in the Erlangen "Zeitschrift für Protestantismus und Kirche"; but I shall here follow his latest presentation of it, in his Dogmatics 1). According to it he teaches concerning the humiliation of Christ: "The incarnation can only have come about in such a way that, through a supernatural, purifying operation upon the old Adamic humanity, the nature—or more precisely the human substrate—was brought about which the Son took up into the unity of his Person by making it his own. The divine Ego of the Son sinks itself into the innermost depth of the humanity prepared for it, in order, out of it, to become the God-man; the Self of God, who effects salvation, becomes one with the self of the man through whom he effects it. In this respect the incarnation is Assumption 2). But for the understanding of the historical Person of the God-man the concept of Assumption does not fully suffice; for on it the relation of the Divine and the Human in Christ still remains burdened with a certain duplicity: the Divine then, as it were, overarches the Human like a wider circle enclosing a narrower one, and in its knowing, living and working extends infinitely far beyond it, as the extra-historical exceeds the temporal, as the already-perfected-in-itself exceeds the still-becoming, as the all-filling and all-determining exceeds the conditioned, that which is bound to the limits and laws of earthly existence. There is, then, a double life; the Logos is, or still always has, something that does not go up wholly into its historical appearance, something that is not also the man Jesus—and this seems to destroy the unity of the Person. We must, therefore, place the incarnation itself precisely in this:

1) Against Thomasius, Brömel too has written, in his little tract: "What does Herr Professor Thomasius teach concerning the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ in the State of Humiliation?" See the excerpt in the October number of the previous volume.
2) G. Thomasius, Dr. and ordinary Professor of Theology at Erlangen, The Person and Work of Christ, Part II, p. 117.