# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1859_S163
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Teaching of the Newest Theology Concerning the Person of Christ, etc. 163

that the eternal Son of God, the second Person of the Godhead, gave himself over into the form of human circumscribedness, and thus into the confinement of a separable existence and under the conditions of a human development, in order, in the fullest sense of the word, to live through with us the life of our race in our nature, without on that account ceasing to be God 1). The Son of God has taken to himself this very nature of ours, and has thus determined himself to be the Ego of a spirit-and-body human individual, and for that very reason his consciousness too is, from the very outset, a specifically human one, the consciousness of a man, and indeed of a soul-and-body, finite man. The difference between him and us lies only in this, that this Ego was not originally born out of the depth of human nature, but was born into it, so as to work itself out, from it and by means of it, into a complete God-manly Person 2). Accordingly the incarnation of the eternal Son of God is indeed not a divesting of the divine mode of being for the humanly creaturely form of existence, nor eo ipso a renunciation of the divine glory 3). This self-limitation of the Logos, already contained in the incarnation, continues on in the humiliation of the God-man through the way of lowliness and suffering, all through the whole way of the cross. The whole earthly life of the Redeemer is therefore, as God-manly, at once a continuation of the incarnation, a revelation, and a self-divesting. It is a revelation of the immanent divine attributes—absolute power, truth, holiness and love; a self-divesting of the relative divine attributes, in which the immanent ones manifest themselves outwardly: omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence 4). The Redeemer, during the state of his earthly life, was neither omnipotent nor omniscient nor omnipresent 5). The human nature of Jesus is, like our own, "flesh" (1 Tim. 3:16; Col. 1:22), but cleansed from hereditary sinfulness. It includes the possibility of sinning, but this possibility was in his case only the purely abstract one, its becoming actual an absolute impossibility. At the same time the Redeemer, because a partaker of our flesh, also participates in our sin and our mortality, that is, in the consequences of human sinfulness 6). The Divine has thus, in descending, entered wholly into the Human. The absolute life which is the essence of the Godhead exists within the narrow confines of an earthly-human life: absolute holiness and truth develop in the form of human thinking and willing, absolute love lives as human feeling in the heart of this man, absolute freedom in the form of human self-determination. The Son of God has not reserved for himself, outside the human kind he assumed, any separate being-for-himself, any separate consciousness, any separate sphere of operation or possession of power; nowhere and in no way does he exist outside of

1) Ibid., p. 129 f. 2) p. 189. 3) p. 131. 4) p. 213 ff. 5) p. 217. 6) p. 119.