Archive for November 2017
Religion
Religion is the power to encounter the unique as unique; superstition is the weakness to make the unique into something already known. . . .
Religion is the power, gentlemen, to neglect space. Philosophy is the power to neglect time. (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Comparative Religion, 1954)
Practical atheism
Ralph Allen Smith, commenting on Zephaniah 1 (emphasis added):
The people that are complacent are saying in their hearts, “The Lord will not do good, nor will he do ill. They are practical atheists, in a way. . . They don’t believe that God is going to bring covenantal blessing or covenantal judgment.“
Fruit
The works of a Christian man, who is justified and saved by his faith out of the pure and unsought mercy of God, ought to be regarded in the same light as would have been those of Adam and Eve in paradise if they had not sinned. Of them it is said, “The Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it” (Gen. 2:15). Now Adam had been created by God just and righteous, so that he could not have needed to be justified and made righteous by keeping the garden and working in it; but, that he might not be unemployed, God gave him the business of keeping and cultivating paradise. These would have indeed been works of perfect freedom, being done for no object but that of pleasing God, and not in order to obtain justification, which he already had to the full, and which would have been innate in us all.
So it is with the works of a believer. Being by his faith replaced afresh in paradise and created anew, he does not need works for his justification, but that he may not be idle, but may exercise his own body and preserve it. His works are to be done freely, with the sole object of pleasing God. Only we are not yet fully created anew in perfect faith and love; these require to be increased, not, however, through works, but through themselves. . . .
True, then, are these two sayings: “Good works do not make a good man, but a good man does good works”; “Bad works do not make a bad man, but a bad man does bad works.” Thus it is always necessary that the substance or person should be good before any good works can be done, and that good works should follow and proceed from a good person. . . .
As then trees must exist before their fruit, and as the fruit does not make the tree either good or bad, but on the contrary, a tree of either kind produces fruit of the same kind, so must first the person of the man be good or bad before he can do either a good or a bad work; and his works do not make him bad or good, but he himself makes his works either bad or good. (Martin Luther, Concerning Christian Liberty)
Veiled
You store up powers of discretion and of decision by reading poetry. Poetry has always to deal with your future. And I’m already able to know what I positively cannot know about myself, in this very strange garment woven as a dream about the future. If you wanted to know the same truth, which the poet offers you, in the form of an ethical code, in the form of a lecture on morality, without this poetic veil, you would become a solemn ass.
It is asinine to study a course of ethics in advance. No situation which you will have to meet will ever have anything to do with all the abstract notions, and sentences, and phrases, which you have picked up in the process of learning about yourself, directly. But it is very different when you have read Goethe’s Werther, or Moby–Dick or Pierre, and then become despondent. Your despondency will be illuminated. You can strengthen and fortify your heart in this simile. (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Make Bold To Be Ashamed, 1953)
I gotta have my orange juice. 