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| What does it all mean, Bertie? |
As here:
"When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said ‘Repent,’ He called for the entire life of believers to be one of penitence." This was the first of Martin Luther’s 95 theses, pinned to the door of a Wittenberg church in 1517—and the beginning of the movement that would ultimately fracture the church and alter the trajectory of the West.
The crux of the matter is in the phrase "entire life". Luther's excellence is that he grasped the difference between what was self-evidently not authentic about Christian civilization and what it should have looked like, but himself fell short of the implications. Well, who hasn't? Haven't all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God?
Jesus did not imagine generation upon generation of millions of repentant believers across the globe spending their long lives daily drowning the Old Adam in the waters of baptism in fervent hope of eternal life as they pursued their vocations to the glory of God. Instead he imagined a few chosen ones from his own generation of Jews repudiating their lives, their relationships, obligations and values, all of which held them back from the righteousness of God, in firm expectation of the imminent in-breaking of the kingdom of God and the final judgment. The history of Christianity is nothing more than a long list of compromises with this radicalism, more or less trying to corral this elephant in the chancel, disguise it or shoot it.
Schweitzer at least let it return to the jungle.
