full justice may be shown to each sphere, while all come together in Christ. All this the possibility of a christology in the sense of the Bible, the realness of the great fact of the incarnation as it has entered into the faith of the christian world through all ages, is felt to involve; and the leading thought of the time accordingly, in the estimation of our author, that which more than any other stirs the inmost depths of its life, is the verification of the full sense of the evangelical mystery through all its length and breadth just in this form. "Christianity demands practical acknowledgment as being in truth the absolute religion, and seeks to show itself, as the highest divine-human power in the world, at once commensurate in force with its universal life and being; a power, in which consequently not merely all truly ideal forces are hid, all treasures of wisdom and knowledge in the form of thought, but that contains also the real force by which the world is carried forward toward its absolute end, the full harmony namely of nature, humanity and God-humanity the organ of God and nature the organ of man in such divine union the kingdom of God fully come; a power, through which thus what appears in the creation of nature and man in the first place under a potential form only, is made to receive the principle of its absolute actualization. Such a system of the absolute involves necessarily for its centre the christological, Christ the God-man, as the personal medium and support of the whole. The absolute religion and Christ the personal absolute religion, imply one another; or the first without the second would be a periphery without centre. In its more general form, as referring to religion at large-humanity the organ of God and nature the organ of man in union with God-the thought before us is most immediately accessible, and has been frequently brought out, or at least felt after, in the latest times, even in the sphere of philosophy; its necessary relation to the christological idea is less seen, although it is an oversight of endless consequence to think of constructing the other without this. To understand both now in their true inward union, and so to set forth the whole world-moving and world-mastering power of Christianity in the strictest sense, forms at present the highest problem of theology, in the solution of which it must find its deepest self-satisfaction, the key for the right understanding of the age, and that intellectual energy which is needed for all true church activity."-P. 10-11.

Two great points, according to Professor Liebner, are pressing towards new determination particularly at this time, in the movement of the christological question. The first is, "the idea of a

theanthropology independently even of sin and its removal; or the idea that God's incarnation stands in an original essential and necessary relation to humanity, and so to the creation itself, as their completion." The second is "the necessity of advancing, on purely christian trinitarian grounds, and in a way that may surmount all pantheistic and Ebionitic views, to such a unity of the true divine-human person, or of the person in which God has really become man, as may leave no longer possible the consequence of a personal disruption of Christ, a dualism in volving finally again the going asunder of the two factors, the divine and the human, in his constitution."

"We are well aware," the author remarks, "that the first point, in its most general expression, the necessity of God's taking flesh,' is still offensive to many, in view especially of its having of late been urged mainly in a form at variance with full christian truth. It has been made to carry in part a pantheistic aspect, or avoiding this it has been directed against the right view of the Trinity, or it has been used finally to corrupt the true doctrine of man's nature as regards sin. All these phases however have no necessary connection with it, but are only a foreign garment thrown around it, or misrepresentations we may say through which the idea but seeks to reach its own right sense. In its proper truth, which was not unknown to the earlier ages of the Church, it belongs rather to genuine christian theism, standing in full agreement with the doctrines of the Trinity, of the creation, and of human freedom, and not at all presupposing the the original necessity or inevitableness of sin; nay, in this true character it claims to enter essentially and indispensably into the very ground of Christianity itself, and to be in the heart of it the actual key of the universal christian system, with which only its absolute fulness can ever be fairly unlocked and revealed.

In virtue of the absolute unity of the eternal purpose of divine love toward the world revealed in Christ, the idea of the world in the christian theistic sense, humanity appears christologically determined and disposed even in its creation itself, forms in its essence and teleology an organic system which has its principle in Christ, the God-man. Christ, even without regard to sin, which belongs not to the conception of man, is the divine-human head of humanity as his a; both are inseparably joined to

“Of course under the supposition of the creation. Freedom characterises God's relation as a whole to the world; it is a system of free divine revelation, which includes the stages of creation and the incarnation."

gether as one organism. God creates humanity, to communicate himself to it as his personal creature, in the way of real revelation, and so to bring it into perfect communion with himself, which is the full idea of religion. This real self-manifestation, self-communication of God to humanity, completes itself and finds perfect satisfaction only in the central and universal person of the God-man, which forms accordingly the completion of humanity itself. The purely harmartological, soteriological method of accounting for the incarnation, (man sinned and therefore only the eternal Son of God became man,) which in the age of the Reformation acquired prominence over against a corrupt theory of sin and salvation, is no longer sufficient. To overcome the more general and deeper contradictions of the latest times, it is necessary to descend more profoundly into the ground of Christianity itself, which is just the idea we have here in view; so that this, in union with the true doctrine of salvation, alone contains full power over these contradictions, and in particular the most perfect and decisive corrective for antichristian pantheism, which well knew what it was about in seeking to master the idea in its own sense. -Sin served only to bring in this modification, which indeed reaches far and deep, that now Christ appears also as a Redeemer and Sacrifice. This sense moreover, when we eye it sharply, will be found to lie in the whole depth of the Protestant (scriptural) principle of justification by faith. For since Christ not only takes away sin or guilt, but also positively gives his whole personal divine-human being to mankind for their positive righteousness, (humanity in every case righteous before God only through faith in Christ, its theanthropic head, all loved only in One, on whom rests the absolute favor of the Father,) this doctrine requires under such positive aspect the acknowledgment, that aside from sin even Christ is the all fulfilling principle of perfection for the race. The whole weight of the soteriological view, (which in the scriptures of course stands out in strong relief,) loses nothing in fact by this idea, but rather finds in it first its proper support; nay, even the O felix culpa Adumi, retains its truth; since that is certainly a new depth of love, which challenged by sin engages the God-man to humble himself even to the curse of death for the redemption of the nature he was pleased to assume.”—P. 13-14.

The second point named, we are told, the bringing of the hy postatical mystery to a fully satisfactory expression between the opposing rocks of pantheism and dualism, has never yet been successfully gained; although it has always been kept steadily

in view by the faith of the Church, as an object never to be sur rendered to any pressure whether to the one side or the other. This is confirmed by proper historical notices, including particularly the later efforts both of the Lutheran and of the Reformed theology on this field. Account is taken also in a general way of the several speculative christological schemes which have been brought forward in modern times, (by Göschel and others,) which are found to fall short of what is here required, though offering indispensable elements for the right solution finally of its problem.

That this right solution of the problem here in view," says Schoeberlein, still remains a desideratum for theology, is not to be denied. Neither the Lutheran nor the Reformed sections of the Church have yet been able to represent the theanthropic person in true unity. The onesided theological leaning of the Lutheran confession has run into docetic consequences, while the onesided anthropological tendency of the Reformed has run into Ebionitic consequences. And the middle view of Zinzendorf and others, which supposes a transformation or letting down of the Logos into a holy man, is no real medium, but leaves the christian consciousness unsatisfied in both directions."

The second part of the work, as already said, is devoted to what the author holds to be the right method of answering the great questions which he thus brings into view. The God-man, he tells us, must be ethically apprehended. All other modes of representation give only a transient show of knowledge. "A truly ethical theanthropology, if it can be reached, must furnish the key at the same time for all christological questions. Such an ethical theanthropology presupposes inwardly however, not only a truly ethical anthropology, but most of all a theology also, in which as the culmination of ethics is given the possibility of a true confluence of the anthropological and the theological in the theanthropological. All this forms then the proper

'In an able review of Liebner's work, approving and endorsing its main substance, in Reuter's Repertorium for September 1850.

It is hardly necessary to remark, that the reference here is to Lutheranism in the sense which the word carries in Germany, where account is still made of the old distinction between the two great Protestant confessions as something real and important. As for our so called " American Lutheranism," which is another thing altogether, a system after the order of Melchisedeck, without genealogy or history, or like the men of Cadmus purely autochthonic-it is not to be supposed, of course, that it should take any interest in this christological question, or in any other bearing directly on the heart of the original Lutheran theology.

christian system. Christianity is essentially an ethical system. The ideas of moral personality, freedom and love, which go far beyond the merely logical and physical, are its inmost marrow. In these it rests, and this universally-in its doctrine of God, no less than in its doctrines of man and of the God-man. It is just for this reason that the christian system is the highest, the system of all systems." Thus it becomes necessary, for the coustruction of a right christology, to fall back on its ultimate grounds in a true christian theology or right doctrine of God. The three spheres, Man, Christ, God, throw light continually on each other; but it is in the last only we are to seek finally the full sense of the whole. "That is, we must follow the grand objective. course of the christian system itself, as it goes forth from the idea of God. The highest truth of this idea however is the christian doctrine of the Trinity, which is itself in truth but the idea of God in full ethical form. The ethical idea authenticates itself here in this, that by its means the doctrine of the Trinity, (what has always been its greatest difficulty.) can be carried out so as to avoid truly both tritheism on the one side and subordinationism on the other. Within the doctrine of the Trinity is to be found then the principle, which lies immediately at the foundation of the ethical idea of the human and the divine human, Man and Christ. This will sum up the whole sense of the christian doctrine of the Logos; whilst it brings out at the same time also the true christological scheme of the world, which is the unity of creation and the incarnation."-P. 66.

What the author proposes thus is to bring out the proper ethical foundation of the christian mystery, (in contradistinction to the insufficient grounds, more or less logical or physical merely, which have been rested upon too generally in the previous christological theories, which he finds occasion to reject for this very reason,) by getting back to its true original and only sufficient seat in a corresponding view of the Godhead, under its christian eternal distinction of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. This leads him through a profound speculative inquiry into the constitution. of the Trinity, in which the text, "GOD IS LOVE," is taken as a guiding pole-star, to be kept constantly in view in the criticism and rejection of what is false as well as in the determination of what is held to be true. The only tight order here is to begin at once not with the abstract, but with the concrete, not with the conception of God in its lowest and most general character, but with this conception as it meets us in its full ethical force in the New Testament. In the way of preparation however for this, it is found well to pass in review the several theories by which