# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1859_S173
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Teaching of the Newest Theology concerning the Person of Christ, etc. 173

human nature, but without sin, unspoiled and holy, in which nature,
however, he willingly and without sin took upon himself the weaknesses
that entered our nature as punishments for sin, and this is the humiliation
of Christ, that he might become a sacrifice for us.*)

Finally, it is already clear from what has preceded that this teaching sets
up a false view of the manner of the union of the two natures in Christ.
For instead of conceiving it, in accordance with Scripture and the
Confession, as an indissoluble, living union in One Person, in which both
natures remain in their full integrity, so that of Christ the God-man the
Godhead can be predicated just as truly and with the same right as the
manhood, they teach rather such a union that at least at the beginning
involved a diminishing of the divine nature — indeed, at bottom a kind of
mixing and transformation of the divine nature into the human — so that
the result of this union is not the one Person of the God-man subsisting in
both natures, but merely a man endowed with actual sinlessness and with
miraculous power, upon whom, at his exaltation, the majesty of the
Godhead was then bestowed. So Christ would, after all, at least in the state
of humiliation, have been a mere man, sharing his miraculous power with
many servants of God, and surpassed — in freedom from sin and its curse
— by Adam and Eve before the fall, and certainly by the angels.**)

And what difference does it make that this man knew himself, in his
human self-consciousness, to be the eternal Son of God, if he had given up
his Godhead and was thus, in truth, no longer the true God? Such a Christ
could never have borne the guilt of the whole world and reconciled all men
to God through his blood. Only the Godhead, united with the manhood,
perfect, unlimited, and undiminished, could do that. For thus speaks God
the Lord, the complete and perfect God, Isaiah 43:25: "I, even I, blot out
your transgressions for my own sake." But Scripture also teaches us quite
differently concerning the Person of Christ. It teaches that in that Person
both natures, although

*) Chemnitius, book on the two natures, chapter III: The Son of God assumed a
true human nature, integral or entire, but without sin, incorrupt and holy — a nature
in which, nevertheless, he willingly and without fault took on the weaknesses which,
as penalties on account of sin, had entered into our nature.

**) Schenkel, in the Allgemeine Kirchenzeitung of January 1859, rightly and regrettably
asks: "Can a theologian in earnest really imagine himself to be Lutheran-orthodox
who maintains of the second Person of the Godhead — as Dr. Thomasius here does —
that it could lose self-consciousness and lead the unconscious plant-life of an embryo,
the dim dream-life of an infant? For thirty years, according to Thomasius, the second
Person of the Godhead in Christ, even after it had finally awakened to
self-consciousness, is supposed not to have possessed its divine attributes at all, so
that one can only ask, with the deepest astonishment: what sort of God is this, who
can cease to be God, and then all at once afterward become God again?"