Emil Brunner ( 6 of 16 )
Feast of Boniface (Wynfrith) of Crediton, Archbishop of Mainz, Apostle of Germany, Martyr, 754 The Pauline teaching is read more
Feast of Boniface (Wynfrith) of Crediton, Archbishop of Mainz, Apostle of Germany, Martyr, 754 The Pauline teaching is the means through which God Himself wants to teach us; Paul's Epistle to the Romans is a letter from God to us, mankind today. It remains the great problem of interpretation, hitherto never entirely solved, how to unite these two things: the keen attention to what Paul wanted to say to that community then, and the search for what God wants to say to us through Paul today. In the end, the question is whether the reader will really allow God to speak to him, or whether he evades God by hiding behind "Paul", behind "the past".
The Revelation of God is not a book or a doctrine, but a living Person.
The Revelation of God is not a book or a doctrine, but a living Person.
O Lord, let thyself be found with a good gift to everyone who needs it, that the happy may find read more
O Lord, let thyself be found with a good gift to everyone who needs it, that the happy may find courage to accept thy good gifts, that the sorrowful may find courage to accept thy perfect gifts. For to men there is a difference of joy and of sorrow, but for thee, O Lord, there is no difference in these things; everything that comes from thee is a good and perfect gift. ... Søren Kierkegaard August 16, 2000 By giving to Jesus Christ, the Man who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, this historical personality, the name of Lord, the Saviour, we renounce all mysticism. For mysticism in the strict sense exists only where one soars above the sphere of history, and where in place of the Mediator and the historical event are put the inner word of God, the inner motions of the soul, in order to reach immediacy between soul and God, and, in the end, the identity of both. But while it is necessary to safeguard the Christian message of the Holy Spirit from the mystical misunderstanding by calling attention to its relation to Jesus Christ, it is necessary on the other hand to safeguard the message of Jesus Christ and His work from the orthodox and rationalist misunderstanding by emphasizing that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Spirit.
One who receives this Word, and by it salvation, receives along with it the duty of passing this Word on... read more
One who receives this Word, and by it salvation, receives along with it the duty of passing this Word on... Where there is no mission, there is no Church, and where there is neither Church nor mission, there is no faith.
Commemoration of Clement, Bishop of Rome, Martyr, c.100 Thanksgiving (U.S.) Eternal life is not an unending continuance of read more
Commemoration of Clement, Bishop of Rome, Martyr, c.100 Thanksgiving (U.S.) Eternal life is not an unending continuance of this life--that would, perhaps, be Hell--but Eternal Life is quite a different life, divine, not mundane; perfect, not earthly; true life, not corrupt half-life. We cannot form a conception of Eternal Life. What we imagine is ever simply of the earth, temporal, worldly. Nor could we know anything about our eternal life if it had not appeared in Jesus Christ. In him we realize that we were created for the eternal life. If we ask, what is this eternal life? what sense is there in thinking about it if we can have no conception of it?, the answer is, "It is life with God, in God, from God; life in perfect fellowship." Therefore it is a life in love, it is love itself. It is a life without the nature of death and sin, hence without sorrow, pain, anxiety, care, misery. To know this suffices to make one rejoice in eternal life. If there were no eternal life, this life of time would be without meaning, goal, or purpose, without significance, without seriousness and without joy. It would be nothing. That our life does not end in nothing, but that eternal life awaits us, is the glad message of Jesus Christ. He came to give us this promise as a light in this dark world. A Christian is a man who has become certain of eternal life through Jesus Christ.
In quite recent times we seem to have entered a particularly dangerous new phase of anthropological aberration, namely, a queer read more
In quite recent times we seem to have entered a particularly dangerous new phase of anthropological aberration, namely, a queer combination of nihilism and deification. Theoretically, man is said to be nothing but an animal with a highly developed cerebrum. At the same time, it is believed of this man that he is capable by science and technical devices of achieving whatever he wants. The deification which might have been thought to be finally overcome, returns as it were from behind, in the form of a deification of technical creativity to which not much less than omnipotence is ascribed. After mankind has done away with the pseudo-religion of race and blood, it is faced with the even greater danger of a technocratical pseudo-religion. There is no room for human personality, freedom and justice in either of these new religions of divine man. But the most dangerous of all must be the one which makes man at the same time nothing and God.
