# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1859_S169
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Teaching of the Newest Theology concerning the Person of Christ, etc. 169

have possessed omniscience, as Thomasius teaches? Is this not a mere play
on words? Absolute power is unthinkable without omnipotence and
omnipresence, and just as much is absolute truth, holiness, and love
unthinkable without omniscience. For the former are, in reality, purely and
simply identical, and it is just as impossible to separate omniscience from
absolute truth, holiness, and love as it is to separate the illuminating and
penetrating radiance from the sunlight itself. How, indeed, could some
divine attributes be present without the others? How can absolute power,
holiness, truth, and love exist without omnipotence, omnipresence, and
omniscience? God is a single Spirit, and therefore indivisible and
inseparable. How can one dissect his being into attributes, retaining some
for him and taking others away? How can absolute perfection and partial
imperfection exist together in one and the same being? One excludes the
other and is therefore impossible. Where absolute perfection is, there the
whole being must be perfect; there is no imperfection there, no limitation,
no lack. If one now ascribes to the Godhead in Christ absolute power,
truth, holiness, and love, one thereby ascribes to it absolute perfection, and
this already includes omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. What
holds against Thomasius holds in still greater measure against Hofmann and
Delitzsch: for if it is false that the Son of God, in becoming man, laid aside
his so-called relative attributes, it is even more certainly false that he laid
aside everything proper to the Godhead except the will. Because, therefore,
the Godhead is unchangeable and indivisible, as we recognize it from Holy
Scripture, it is an error to say that the Godhead, as it is in the Son, could
have laid aside and been without a part of its essential attributes, even for
a time.

Furthermore, the Word of God teaches that in all three Persons of the
Holy Trinity the divine essence is whole and undiminished, and that at all
times, from eternity to eternity. That before the incarnation and after the
exaltation the Son possessed the Godhead just as the Father and the Holy
Spirit did, those theologians do not deny. But had this not been the case
during the state of humiliation, then in the Son the one divine essence
would have been humbled and diminished — that is, as I have just shown,
abolished and annihilated. But since there is only one divine essence,
which, being the very same in the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, is
alike whole and perfect in each, it follows that no change can befall it in
the Person of the Son (were that even possible) without its being changed
at the same time also for the Father and the Holy Spirit. From the
humiliation of the Godhead in the second Person there follows, with
inescapable consequence, the humiliation of the Godhead in the other
Persons as well. And what, then, would further follow? There would have
been, during the thirty-three years of Christ's humiliation, no almighty, no
omniscient, and no omnipresent God — that is to say, none at all. Or, which
is the very same consequence put another way, there would have been
three, or at least two,