Sublime

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.

by affirming Augustine’s inwardness and the ability of each individual to read the Bible and stand before God’s justifying action themselves, Luther rejects that some people are spiritually dependent on what other people do. What the priest and pope do is not superior in kind to what farmers and housemaids do.

Much could be said about this. Let us content ourselves with the indispensable elucidations by first asking what it really means to say that this logos, whose thought is the world, is a person and that therefore faith is the option in favor of the primacy of the particular over the universal. In the last analysis, the answer can be put quite simply

Martin Luther was asked what he contributed to his salvation, he replied, “Sin and resistance.” God Himself has done all that He requires of us. May we learn how to rest in Him, because He’s where the joy is!

The intellectual underpinnings of Bonhoeffer’s convictions on life in a Christian faith community can be traced to his early works Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being, which undergirded his interpretation of the church as a primary form of God’s self-revelation.

what Barth sees in 1924, now reflecting on a decade of pastoral ministry, is that the real dialectic of time/eternity is substantive in its articulation of human dissonance, but not articulate enough in its relation to Jesus’s own act and being and his call to live in and love the world.

Under the pen of Luther, the principles of the movement became ever clearer: the ‘priesthood of all believers’, the complete dependency of the soul on God’s grace, unmerited election to salvation, the ‘bondage of the will’ of fallen humanity (either to the devil or to God), the ‘freedom of the Christian’, salvation by faith and not by works, and th