# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1859_S167
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Teaching of the Newest Theology Concerning the Person of Christ, etc. 167

-fold God, so little a gap that it rather concentrated itself in this self-divesting of the Son. In it the free self-power of the eternal Son reaches its summit; its effects extend not to the whole of mankind alone, but to heaven and earth."

Among the theologians of the Lutheran confession, besides those named, the following have, according to Thomasius's own statements*), avowed themselves to that doctrine: Besser, in the Zeitschrift für lutherische Theologie und Kirche, Erlangen 1848, number 1; Liebner, Christologie, p. 321; further, Oehler, in Reuter's Repertorium, 1851.

With the theologians named, the Reformed Dr. Ebrard has arrived at the same view of the humiliation of Christ, having reached, by way of the old Reformed dogmaticians, the same result. He has most recently expressed himself on this subject in Herzog's Encyclopädie, p. 597 ff., where it says, among other things: "Holy Scripture teaches that he who in eternity is God of God and in God has entered into the sphere of time and space and has become something which is not God but man. He who eternally calls forth and spans all times and spaces betakes himself, in an act of self-divesting, into the confines of time, of space, of human existence and life, of willing and beholding, of feeling and knowing. Here there is taken up into the idea of God the concept of livingness and of the possibility of a self-alteration and self-limitation—not, to be sure, one by which God would lose himself, but one in which he holds fast to himself, and from which he has the power to take himself back." He accepts the doctrine of the Reformed and Philippist theologians: "The Logos has not given up the divine essence, but has indeed given up the form of the world-governing eternity that spans all times and spaces, and has taken on the temporal-spatial form of existence of human being, life, feeling, willing, thinking; he has become a human life-center, a human soul, and as such entered into the womb of the Virgin, has here formed for himself a body, and has thereupon developed, genuinely humanly, on both the spiritual and the bodily side. To redeem us, he took on the constitution of the human nature that stands under the consequences of sin, burdened with the accidents of mortality and weakness (only without the accident of sin, and with the accident of miraculous power), and in this consists the status humilis. But after he had accomplished the work of redemption, the human nature was, in him as the firstfruits, freed from that accident, that is, was glorified, and his status gloriae began. With the glorified human nature, participation in the world-governing rule of the Father (sessio ad dextram) is compatible, which was not compatible with the unglorified nature."

Let us now gather together the essential content of the foregoing statements, and there results for us the following as the doctrine common to those theologians concerning

*) Dogmatik II, p. 80.