# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1859_S165
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Teaching of the Newest Theology Concerning the Person of Christ, etc. 165

as their possession was not required for his work of redemption. Our formulation serves to bring out the contrast with the Reformed doctrine yet more sharply. For whereas otherwise, over against the Zwinglian and Calvinist doctrine that Christ came to earth without leaving heaven, the Lutheran side sets up the claim that he was at the same time in heaven while he walked on earth—whereby there always still remains the appearance of a divided mode of being, only not a being at once within and outside of human nature, but rather a twofold mode of being of one and the same [subject]—with our own formulation even this last appearance falls away, as though the eternal God the Son, become man, had stood in a duality of historical life. He has not, indeed, exchanged the form of eternity for the form of temporality; rather he, who is equally the Eternal One here and there, has passed out of his historical state of supra-worldliness, of world-ruling ability and willing and presence, into inner-worldliness, into the human circumscribedness of existence and knowing and being able, exchanging one historical exercise of his eternal essence for the other. Thereby the inequality of the ever-divine relation (the Trinity), in its historical configuration, became as great as it could become without a self-denial of God; but even in its utmost inequality it still remained itself. Not partially, but wholly and without reservation, Christ, in his incarnation, gave up every supra-worldly self-manifestation, without thereby ceasing to be the eternal God, and gave himself over into human circumscribedness, without thereby becoming a finite creature 1). And indeed Christ made the human nature, as it exists as a consequence of sin, his own nature, but in such a way that his nature, without sin, bears in itself the consequences of sin 2). With the glorification, however, the human nature of Jesus becomes the perfect means for the exercise of his fellowship with God the Father, a fellowship at once eternal and historically consummated. Corporeality is no longer a limit and a ban, but unconditionally and solely a means of his presence and self-manifestation. Now he sits at the right hand of God, which means: he has a share in God's power and its exercise; and since God's throning is one and the same as his supra-worldly presence to the world, we are to understand Jesus's sitting at the right hand of God likewise as a participation in God's supra-worldly presence to the world, as opposed to every inner-worldly limitation 3)."

Kahnis says in his "Doctrine of the Holy Spirit," p. 58: "The Johannine statement, The Word was made flesh, does not express a taking-on or a putting-on of human nature, but a passing-over into it; it requires, therefore, that the infinite Logos-consciousness should have become a finite human one. If church doctrine rightly derives the self-consciousness of Christ not from the human nature but from the Logos-nature, then it must still take the further step of a finitizing of the Logos-consciousness

1) Ibid., II.1, p. 20–23. 2) p. 35. 3) p. 350 ff.