Ethics

This beatitude puts those Christians entirely in the wrong who, in their mistaken anxiety to act rightly, seek to avoid any suffering for the sake of a just, good and true cause, because, as they maintain, they could with a clear conscience suffer only an explicit profession of faith in Christ;

The guilt of the apostasy from Christ is a guilt which is shared in common by the entire western world, however greatly the degree of the offence may vary. The justification and the renewal must therefore likewise be shared in common by the whole of the west. No attempt can succeed which aims at saving the west while excluding one of the western na

torn asunder. There is the kingdom of the preached word of God, and there is the kingdom of the sword. The kingdom of the Church, and the kingdom of the world. The realm of the spiritual office, and the realm of secular government. The sword can never bring about the unity of the Church and of the faith. Preaching can never govern nations. But the

certainly only of a disunited fellowship. But both must always be present.

destruction of life as we have it. The drastic acceptance or rejection of earthly life reveals that only death has any value here. To clutch at everything or to cast away everything is the reaction of one who believes fanatically in death.

Man knows good and evil, but because he is not the origin, because he acquires this knowledge only at the price of estrangement from the origin, the good and evil that he knows are not the good and evil of God but good and evil against God.

Ethics as formation, then, means the bold endeavour to speak about the way in which the form of Jesus Christ takes form in our world, in a manner which is neither abstract nor casuistic, neither programmatic nor purely speculative. Concrete judgements and decisions will have to be ventured here. Decision and action can here no longer be delegated t

“Every profound mind requires a mask,” said Nietzsche. Yet this mask is not a disguise; it is not intended to deceive the other man, but it is a necessary sign of the actual situation of disunion. For that reason it is to be respected. Beneath the mask there is the longing for the restoration of the lost unity.

Originally man was made in the image of God, but now his likeness to God is a stolen one. As the image of God man draws his life entirely from his origin in God, but the man who has become like God has forgotten how he was at his origin and has made himself his own creator and judge. What God had given man to be, man now desired to be through himse