Note (return) — APPENDIX I.

With this transition the theories concerning Christ are removed from Jewish and Old Testament soil, and also that of religion (in the strict sense of the word), and transplanted to the Greek one. Even in his pre-existent state Christ is an independent power existing side by side with God. The pre-existence does not refer to his whole appearance, but only to a part of his essence; it does not primarily serve to glorify the wisdom and power of the God who guides history, but only glorifies Christ, and thereby threatens the monarchy of God.453 The appearance of Christ is now an "assumption of flesh", and immediately the intricate questions about the connection of the heavenly and spiritual being with the flesh simultaneously arise and are at first settled by the theories of a naive docetism. But the flesh, that is the human nature created by God, appears depreciated, because it was reckoned as something unsuitable for Christ, and foreign to him as a spiritual being. Thus the Christian religion was mixed up with the refined asceticism of a perishing civilization, and a foreign substructure given to its system of morality, so earnest in its simplicity.454 But the most questionable result was the following. Since the predicate "Logos", which at first, and for a long time, coincided with the idea of the reason ruling in the cosmos, was considered as the highest that could be given to Christ, the holy and divine element, namely, the power of a new life, a power to be viewed and laid hold of in Christ, was transformed into a cosmic force and thereby secularised.