# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1859_S166
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

so as to gain, for the human nature, a human consciousness."

Delitzsch declares in his Biblical Psychology, p. 282: "It is, as is well known, one of the greatest, holiest, most research-worthy tasks of more recent theology, in keeping with the thoroughgoing impression of true humanity and undivided unity that the Person of Christ makes as he presents himself to us in Scripture, to remove in such a way the self-contradictory dualism beyond which the church's view of the God-man has not been able to advance, that, without falling back into overcome errors, the substance of the catholic dogma is preserved.—The Redeemer is not in possession of the eternal doxa, for he asks to have it back, John 17:5. He is not omniscient, for he does not know, as he himself says, the day and hour of the end, Mark 13:32. He is not omnipotent, for all power is, as the Risen One says, given to him, Matt. 28:18. He is not omnipresent, for in order to fill all things he has ascended, Eph. 4:10. It must therefore be shown how the Logos could truly and actually give up the eternal doxa and the attributes of his divine mode of being, without yet giving up his divine being, whose image the doxa is and whose energy those attributes are. The basic presupposition of this possibility consists in this, that the root of the essence of the Godhead as such, and of each of the three Persons in particular (as, in an image-like way, of the human spirit), is the will, which itself stands to consciousness as a prius; and that accordingly the Son of God, without giving himself up, could, by withdrawing to this lowest basis, this primal potency, this all-concluding ground of his essence, and thus, with a divesting of the unfolding of his essence, make himself the subject of a human personality, and become objective to himself in a consciousness which, although it has his now twofold being as its content, is nevertheless not a double one, but a single one. Thereby no hindrance came into the immanent trinitarian process, for the two eternal acts—that of the Father, by virtue of which he sums up the fullness of his essence in the Son as image and object, and that of the Son, by virtue of which he grasps himself as God of God and turns back to his origin in radiant love—these two inner-divine acts remain in their eternally self-identical continuance; the Son remained, even in that withdrawal of the unfolding of his essence in which the self-divesting consists, the other divine will, in which the archetypal will of the Father is mirrored and which has the fullness of the Father's essence as its moving content. Nor did any gap thereby arise in the world-sustaining and world-governing activity of the triune Godhead, for in the self-divesting of the Son the eternal will of love of the triune God, and thus his own eternal will, is indeed realized. Redemption is the center of the sustaining and governing of the world, and inasmuch as God the Son, by a return to the ground of his essence, exchanged the form of God for the form of a servant, no gap thereby came into the world-sustaining and world-governing activity of the three-