# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1859_S171
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Teaching of the Newest Theology concerning the Person of Christ, etc. 171

certain individual works of the Godhead can take place shows clearly the
word of the following verse: "The Father shows him all that he does." From
this it must be concluded with irrefutable certainty that the Son, having
become man, was even in the state of humiliation omniscient, because God
the Father showed him all that he did; and that he was almighty and
omnipresent, because whatever the Father did, the Son likewise did also.
As the Father and the Holy Spirit do, so also God the Son, without change
or interruption, governs heaven and earth from eternity to eternity. The
humiliation of Christ has therefore by no means taken place according to
his Godhead, but solely and only according to his human nature, which is
indissolubly and inseparably bound with God the Son into one single
Person. This nature, to be sure, does not subsist for itself; it is no person,
but exists only in the unity of the Person of God the Son. For Christ is one,
not two. And when Luther speaks of "two pieces" in the Person of Christ
(in the great confession concerning the Holy Supper), this is merely a
distinction, made for the needs of human thought and for the purpose of
doctrinal exposition, within what in reality exists as an indissoluble unity
— and not a tearing apart of the Person, as Ebrard alleges against him.
Nothing was further from Luther's mind than this. Yet, while holding to
the personal unity, Holy Scripture nevertheless testifies that Christ, while
remaining according to his Godhead wholly and entirely as he was from
eternity, humbled himself according to the humanity he had assumed — and
only according to it. This is taught above all by the chief text, Philippians
2:6ff., from which those theologians, incomprehensibly, wish to prove their
false doctrine. For it does not say there of God the Son that by the mere
act of the incarnation he had already, in himself, divested himself of and
humbled his form of God; rather, the subject there is Jesus Christ, already
become man. Therefore what is said of him cannot refer to the incarnation
as such, but only to what happened, in the one who had become man, and
specifically and in the first place in the human nature he had assumed,
according to his own free self-determination.

To the human nature specifically and in the first place point all the
statements in which the apostle, in our passage, speaks of the one who had
become man. The emptying, the becoming like another man, the being
found in outward form like another man, the humbling in obedience unto
bodily death — all this can never apply to the Godhead and can be referred
to it only by force, by tearing individual pieces away from the others and
out of their context, and by thereby contradicting all those utterly clear
passages according to which no change, emptying, or humiliation can
happen to the Godhead. Rather, what is being spoken of here, clearly and
expressly, is what has happened, according to his own will, to the
humanity which the Son of God took up into the unity of his Person. For
all those particulars are not God's affair, but man's.