# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1859_S170
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

divine essence — such that the one subsisting in the Son would have changed
and been humbled, and thus for that time abolished and annihilated in
itself, while the other two, or the other, remained unchanged in divine
majesty. Such follies, such senseless and unbiblical errors, which destroy
and pervert the eternal truth in its very first principles, this false teaching
contains within itself. On such a swamp does this new will-o'-the-wisp
perform its seductive conjuror's dance. Who is not filled with grief and
sorrow that men otherwise so excellent, theologians so great, stars shining
so brightly in the firmament of Christian scholarship, should let the devil
cast over them such snares of falsehood as any catechism pupil can ward
off, so long as he remains, in faith, with the simple Word of God and trusts
the Holy Spirit more than his own mad reason, which in matters of faith
can only ever bring folly and abomination to light.

Moreover, Holy Scripture teaches not only that before the incarnation
and after the exaltation — which those scholars likewise do not deny — the
whole, undiminished, and unbounded fullness of the divine essence and the
complete, unimpaired totality of the divine attributes was and is in the
Son, but it expressly says this in particular also of the Son during the time
of the humiliation of the Person of Christ. During this time the Son said of
himself: "I and the Father are one," that is, one essence, which is thus just
as wholly and undiminishedly the Son's essence as it is the Father's, and
that during the time of the humiliation of the Person of Christ. For it says:
"we are one," and not: "we were one" or "we will be one." The same is
attested by the words: "He who has seen me has seen the Father." "Believe
me, that I am in the Father, and the Father in me" — namely through the
unity of essence. That the Son, even during this time, possessed all and
every divine attribute without exception as his own is stated in John 16:15:
"All that the Father has is mine." Through Matthew 11:27: "All things
have been delivered to me by my Father," the Lord declares of himself,
during the time of the humiliation of his Person, that he is almighty,
omniscient, and omnipresent. For if all things were even then subject to
him, if he even then truly and actually was Lord of heaven and earth, then
he must necessarily have possessed the full divine omnipotence,
omniscience, and omnipresence, just as wholly and undiminishedly as
before the incarnation and after the exaltation. And that Christ, in the
humiliation belonging to his Godhead, actually made use of the
omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience proper to him, and thus, even
while going about on earth according to his humanity in the form of a
servant, sustained and governed the world as the true God together with
the Father and the Holy Spirit, in divine power and majesty — this he
states expressly in John 5:19: "Truly, truly, I say to you: the Son can do
nothing of himself, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever
the Father does, the Son likewise does also." And that there is no restriction
upon