Theologians From Germany

"Of all animals man only is endowed with reason, properly so called, so he only hath a will, and is capable of virtue and vice, rewards and punishments. Yet something bearing a resemblance to each of these, may also be found in brutes, especially such as are more perfect, and more capable of discipline. For there is in them a certain faculty that answers to reason, called by some an inferior degree of reason, whereby they not only consider in a manner what is pleasant and profitable, and search for the means of attaining them; but they likewise acknowledge a certain manner of living suitable to their nature prescribed to them by God, which has some affinity to virtue."

"God desires to indwell in my whole and total heart and cannot in any way tolerate my having an image in my mind's eye."

"The popes ... noted that when they led the little sheep to books, their junk market did not prosper and people wanted to know what is godly or ungodly, right or wrong."

"Beggars are a sure indicator that there are no Christians, or else very few and dispirited ones, in any town in which beggars are seen."

"Who will believe us when we say that we do not love these stuffed dummies—carved or painted images—when our deeds convict us? God hates and despises images, as I shall show. He considers them an abomination and says that all human beings are in his eyes as the things they love. Images are an abomination; it follows therefore that we too shall become abominable, if we love them."

"It cannot therefore be true that images are the textbooks of laypersons. For they are unable to learn their salvation from them. ... How can you save lay persons when you ascribe to images the power which God gave to his word alone?"

"If you were to really hate and dislike a picture with all your heart, so that you could not bear to see or hear of it, how would you like it if someone insisted on getting to know and honor you through such a hated, horrible book? ... And God says that he does not like any image which we make, and ... that he hates and despises all who love images."

"How can you save lay persons when you ascribe to images the power which God gave to his word alone?"

"Christian identity can be understood only as an act of identification with the crucified Christ, to the extent to which one has accepted the proclamation that in him God has identified himself with the godless and those abandoned by God."

"One cannot grasp freedom in faith without hearing simultaneously the categorical imperative: One must serve through bodily, social and political obedience the liberation of the suffering creation out of real affliction. ... Consequently, the missionary proclamation of the cross of the Resurrected One is not an opium of the people which intoxicates and incapacitates, but the ferment of new freedom. It leads to the awaking of that revolt which, in the "power of the resurrection" ... follows the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a being who labors and is heavily laden,"

"God despises the powerful and the mighty, the likes of Herod, Caiaphas, and Annas, and he accepts for his service the small, like Mary, Zechariah, and Elizabeth. For that is God's way of working , and down to the present day he does not act otherwise."

"Man must smash to bits his stolen, contrived Christian faith through powerful, enormous suffering of the heart, through an amazement that cannot be rejected. Through this, man becomes very small and despicable in his own eyes."

"God speaks only in the suffering of creatures, a suffering that the hearts of the unbelievers do not have because they become more and more hardened."

"The clergy have never been able to discover, nor will they ever, the beneficial tribulations and useful abyss that the providential spirit meets as it empties itself."

"The spirit of the strength and fear of God be with you , you pitiable community. After the libelous writing [of Luther] have made you partly fearful - and also most impudent - it is exceedingly necessary for me to counter the rising evil with a demonstration of Christian mastery. At the present time, this mastery cannot be shown except through an exposition of holy Scripture, especially the teachings of the spirit of Christ, and through a comprehensive comparison of all the secrets and judgement of God. For all knowledge contains within itself its diametrical opposite."

"Das Volk wird frei werden, und Gott will allein der Herr darüber sein!"

"Sieh zu, die Grundsuppe des Wuchers, der Dieberei und Räuberei sein unser Herrn und Fürsten, nehmen alle Kreaturen zum Eigentum: die Fisch im Wasser, die Vögel in der Luft, das Gewächs auf Erden muß alles ihr sein (Jes. 5). Darüber lassen sie dann Gottes Gebot ausgehen unter die Armen und sprechen: »Gott hat geboten: Du sollst nicht stehlen.«"

"Oh, dearest brothers, of what else does this Gospel of Luke remind us? Only that faith with all its sources, presents us with impossible things, which the tender ones believe will never come to pass in reality. The whole insane, fantastic world sets and the world says with a little forked tongue: 'Yes, one can indeed preach the Gospel, fear God alone, and yet also hold in honour the unreasonable rulers, even though they strive against all justic and do not accept God's word. Oh, for God's sake, one should be obedient to them in all things, those Good Junkers.' Yes welcome, you [i.e. Martin Luther ] defender of the godless! How fine, how very fine it must be to be so able to serve with praise two masters who strive against one another, as the advisers of the rulers truly do! Oh, how skillful clever reason thinks it is! In its hypocrisy, it uses love of neighbor to dress up and ornament itself in the most imposing manner."

"The league at Allstedt wanted to establish this principle, Omnia sunt communia, ‘All property should be held in common’ and should be distributed to each according to his needs, as the occasion required. Any prince, count, or lord who did not want to do this, after first being warned about it, should be beheaded or hanged."

"Es ist der Natur ein unleidlichs Werk, die Furcht Gottes zum Anfang des Glaubens zu machen."

"Our learned ones would gladly like to give the witness of Jesus' spirit a higher education. They will completely fail in this because they are not educated enough to teach so that through their teachings the common man may be brought up to their level. Rather, the learned ones alone want to pass judgment on the faith with their stolen Scripture, although they are totally and completely without faith, either before God or before men. For everyone perceives and realizes that they strive for honours and worldly goods. Therefore, you, the common man, must become learned yourself, so that you will be misled no longer. The same spirit of Christ will help you in this which will mock our learned ones to their destruction."

"Thomas Müntzer will not pray to a dumb God, but rather to ones who speaks."

"Freely and boldly I declare that I have never heard a single donkey-cunt doctor of theology, in the smallest of his divisions and points, even whisper, to say nothing of speaking loudly, and points, even whisper, to say nothing of speaking loudly, about the order (established in God and all his creatures)."

"What do you believe was on the mind of the ancient Romans that they called the arts of speaking humanity? They judged that, indisputably, by the study of these disciplines not only was the tongue refined, but also the wildness and barbarity of people’s minds was amended."

"Sagacity and eloquence are linked together to such an extent that they cannot be torn asunder for any reason."

"How miserable is the condition of men when the better a thing is, the further it recedes from our sight and the less it is recognized."

"It does not make such a difference whether you are simply mute or employ no art for speaking. For it is not feasible that you can express what you think as it should be understood unless you acquire and strengthen the ability to speak by art."

"No one will be able to speak suitably and clearly about anything unless he has shaped his speech by some art, by imitation of the best."

"Opto autem, ut sapientum Principum consilio, et autoritate aliquando, et ex aliarum gentium Ecclesiis, et nostris, pii et eruditi viri convocentur, ut de omnibus controversiis deliberetur, et una consentiens forma doctrinae vera et perspicua, sine ulla ambiguitate posteritati tradatur."

"Ab ipso colaphos acceperim or Ab ipso colaphos accepi."

"Does the painter imitate the body correctly if he guides his brush without any method, and if his hand is moved at random and the lines are not drawn with art? In the same way you will not put the sentiment of your mind in front of the others’ eyes unless you use appropriate and distinct words, a fitting arrangement of words and the right order of sentences. For, just as we represent bodies by colours, we represent the sentiment of our mind by speech."

"You can see for what reason I commend the study of eloquence to you—because we can neither explain what we ourselves want, nor understand the surviving writing written by our ancestors, unless we have thoroughly studied a fixed rule for speaking. For my part, I do not see how there could be others who wish neither to explain what they think, nor to understand what is excellently said."

"The shadow does not follow the body more closely than eloquence accompanies sagacity."

"As faith in mankind, Israel's faith is hope. And it is this epitome of Israel's prophetism, this hope in mankind's future, that comprises the substance of the messianic idea."

"Wherever rights are denied the poor, the prophetic anger is turned not merely against the incumbent rulers but equally against the means society employs to gloss over its own mendacity. And foremost among these means is art. Catering to luxury and emphasizing only the beautiful, art denies the fact that wretchedness and destitution have a tight grip on the poor. This is the reason why the prophetic zeal turned against art, and not merely against the luxury of women and the pretentiousness of the rich."

"Love of God implies love of religion. And religion exemplifies that creative spirit of God which is at work in history as well as in the mind of man. Thus, one ought to love any religion, that is, religion as such, and in any form—as a manifestation of the moral spirit, the divine spirit of mankind."

"Ethics must not remain a lovely abstraction; it must be concretized into valid truth. At this point ethics joins forces with religion because ethics too has ultimately no other recourse but to hypothesize the idea of God: not for the personal redemption of the moral individual but as a guarantee for the eventual realization of morality in this world."

"Wurm, der ich bin, von Leidenschaften zerfressen, der Selbstsucht zum Köder hingeworfen, soll ich dennoch den Menschen lieben. Wenn ich dies kann, und sofern ich dies kann, kann ich auch Gott lieben."

"Only the idea of God gives me the confidence that morality will become reality on earth. And because I cannot live without this confidence, I cannot live without God."

"Man's hope is transformed into faith when he no longer thinks of himself alone, that is, of his salvation here and now, or of his eternal salvation (the latter, if I may say so, with calculating sanctimoniousness). Hope is transformed into faith when man associates the future with the emergence of a community whose concerns will reach beyond its everyday concrete reality. Such a community will not be composed merely of man's immediate circle of friends or family nor will it include only those who share his own cherished beliefs; indeed, it will even cut across the borders of his own country because it will represent the community of mankind."

"An dem Armen geht mir der Mensch auf. Daher kann ich den Menschen nicht denken ohne das Mitleid mit ihm, ohne die Liebe zu ihm. Nicht das Universum, aber das sittliche Universum, das soziale Dasein der Menschen muß ich denken und lieben, wenn mein Denken Gottes: Liebe heißen darf."

"Unter dieser Beleuchtung entsteht mir der Gott, der der Beistand des Armen ist und sein Rächer in der Weltgeschichte. Diesen Rächer der Armen liebe ich."

"Wenn ich Gott liebe, so liebe ich nicht pantheistisch das Universum, nicht die Tiere, die Bäume und die Kräuter, als meine Mitgeschöpfe, sondern aber ich liebe in Gott einseitig den Vater der Menschen, und diese höhere Bedeutung und diese soziale Prägnanz hat nunmehr der religiöse Terminus von Gott alsVater: er ist nicht sowohl der Schöpfer und Urheber, sondern vielmehr der Schutz und Beistand der Armen."

"Chinesisch ist die leichteste Sprache, wenn sie unbefangen gelernt wird, vom Sinn her eher als vom Einzelausdruck. Aber für neugierige Frager bietet die Sprache eitel Tücken."

"As a young man Wilhelm had gone to China in the service of a Christian mission, and there the mental world of the Orient had opened its doors wide to him. Wilhelm was a truly religious spirit, with an unclouded and farsighted view of things. He had the gift of being able to listen without bias to the revelations of a foreign mentality, and to accomplish that miracle of empathy which enabled him to make the intellectual treasures of China accessible to Europe. He was deeply influenced by Chinese culture, and once said to me, "It is a great satisfaction to me that I never baptized a single Chinese!" In spite of his Christian background, he could not help recognizing the logic and clarity of Chinese thought. [...] Clear and unmistakably Western as his mentality was, in his I Ching commentary he manifested a degree of adaptation to Chinese psychology which is altogether unmatched."

"More than 200 years later, the Sinologist Richard Wilhelm explained to a friend the hardships involved in trying to interest Weimar Germans in Chinese cultural history. In the past couple of years, Wilhelm wrote, he had been living “the life of a vagabond,” dragging slides and lectures everywhere, attending many gemiitlich get-togethers “in which one has always to inform people that the Chinese do not eat earthworms and rotten eggs and only rarely kill their little girls ..."

"Carl Jung on Richard Wilhelm"

"Western civilisation, with its own spirituality, has permeated all corners of the earth. My thesis is that this is the spirituality of money."

"On the journey to Antwerp Reb Baruch Laib went out of his way to create still further unpleasantness. The trouble this time was a book which Deborah had picked up from her mother (who had just finished with it), and to which she now turned eagerly to while the time away. Before long she had become deeply absorbed in its pages-it was a Life of Moses Mendelssohn-and her heart bled as she followed the adventures of this poor suffering philosopher-hunchback. His indomitable struggle against his own physical infirmity and external antagonism aroused her deepest admiration. The account of how the authorities turned him back from all the gates of the city of Berlin, filled her with profound pity for the bright-eyed cripple, who, intellectually and spiritually, towered so high above the common clay that barred his way; and she was filled with hatred and contempt for the police who played such an abominable part in the drama. His ultimate triumph over untold opposition was like a personal victory of her own, and how she exulted! She was so carried away that her own life was forgotten. But Reb Baruch Laib took care that this forgetfulness should be short-lived. "There can be no doubt about it now," he fumed. "She's a freethinker ! Look, she's reading the biography of that heretic Mendelssohn!...""

"Divine religion ... does not prod men with an iron rod; it guides them with bands of love. It draws no avenging sword, dispenses no temporal goods, assumes no right to any earthly possessions, and claims no external power over the mind. Its weapons are reason and persuasion; its strength is the divine power of truth."