# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1859_S164
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

of the flesh; he has become man in the totality of his life, his existence and form of life being that of a spirit-and-body man conditioned by time and space. Yet Christ, even in his human limitation, knows himself as the Son of God become man, and from this it explains itself how in his consciousness now the one, now the other side predominates; but this is not a relation between a divine and a human consciousness, not the difference between a divine and a human will—it compares not so much to the relation of soul and body, but rather to the spiritual and natural life of the regenerate man, and thus does not fall outside the unity of the personality, but into the one subject, identical with itself. 1) In contrast to the state of humiliation, that in which the exalted God-man finds himself must be a state of unlimited freedom and absolute might of life; as the Exalted One he must now stand in full possession of the divine glory of which he divested himself, and thus in that mode of existence and operation for which, with the incarnation, the possibility was indeed already given, but which could not and should not come about until the work of redemption in the flesh was accomplished. The glorified Christ is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient 2). We accordingly reserve the whole glory of the transfiguration or exaltation for this later state, whereas Luther already lets it fall within the temporal life that begins with the incarnation 3)."

This is the view of Thomasius. It has been adopted by several theologians of leading influence within the Lutheran church, whose statements I wish to communicate, so far as they are accessible to me, and indeed more briefly, since they agree in essentials with Thomasius, and the chief concern here is to demonstrate this agreement, whereby at the same time the view expressed by various men is itself brought to a clearer and more definite presentation, and the influence of the newly revived error is set before the eyes.

Prof. von Hofmann in Erlangen has not merely adopted the view of Thomasius, but has developed it further in its consequences. He teaches in his "Schriftbeweis": "Christ, through the incarnation, divested himself of the divine glory which he had with God; he laid aside his form of God, in which he presented and exercised himself, super-worldly, as ruler, and exchanged it for an in-worldly form of a servant, in which he had to serve the power ruling over the world 4). His self-activity from his incarnation onward is no longer a divine one, but a human one. We can say, with Zanchius, that Christ divested himself of the divine glory, omnipotence and omnipresence, and became, from a God, a man; and there is no need of the cautious limitation (of Thomasius)—indeed we must reject it as disturbing—that he who became man divested himself of the fullness of his divine power only so far as