human, but the divine nature of Christ. In the
process of justification or of making man righteous, the human nature of
Christ merely serves as a medium, or as it were, a canal, through which
the eternal essential wisdom, holiness, and righteousness of Christ's
divine nature flows into our hearts.

Christ, the "inner Word" (John 1), says Osiander, approaches man in the
"external Word" (the words spoken by Jesus and His apostles), and
through it enters the believing soul. For through Word, Sacrament, and
faith we are united with His humanity. In the Lord's Supper, for
instance, we become the flesh and blood of Christ, just as we draw the
nourishment out of natural food and transform it into our flesh and
blood. And since the humanity of Christ, with which we become one in the
manner described, is personally united with the deity, it imparts to us
also the divine essence, and, as a result, we, too, are the abode of the
essential righteousness of God. "We cannot receive the divine nature
from Christ," says Osiander, "if we are not embodied in Him by faith and
Baptism, thus becoming flesh and blood and bone of His flesh, blood, and
bone." As the branches could not partake of the nature of the vine if
they were not of the wood of the vine, even so we could not share the
divine nature of Christ if we had not, incorporated in Him by faith and
Baptism, become flesh, blood, and bone of His flesh, blood, and bone.
Accordingly, as Christ's humanity became righteous through the union
with God, the essential righteousness which moved Him to obedience
toward God, thus we also become righteous through our union with Christ
and in Him with God. (Frank 2, 104. 20ff.; Seeberg 4, 497f.)

In view of such speculative teaching, in which justification is
transformed into a sort of mystico-physical process, it is not
surprising that the charge of pantheism was also raised against
Osiander. The theologians of Brandenburg asserted that he inferred from
his doctrine that the believers in Christ are also divine persons,
because the Father, Son and Holy Ghost dwell in them essentially. But
Osiander protested: "Creatures we are and creatures we remain, no matter
how wonderfully we are renewed; but the seed of God and the entire
divine essence which is in us by grace in the same manner as it is in
Christ by nature and remains eternally in us (_das also aus Gnaden in
uns ist wie in Christo von Natur und bleibt ewiglich in uns_) is God
Himself, and no