26 April 2007

Old Lutheran Quote of the Day

We must not determine the status of our faith on the basis of our feeling of comfort or spiritual joy. -- Martin Chemnitz, Locus on Justification, p. 106

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Right.

IF one were so self-absorbed as to feel the need to determine the status of his faith, the way to do that would be by his works.

But preferably, self-examination should be done not for ourselves (to reassure ourselves about our faith), but out of love and gratitude, to become aware of and repent of whatever in us is not pleasing to Christ.

Anastasia

Anonymous said...

The second Martin is so 'contemporary' isn't he. Like Pieps always said, nothing much new after 1700.

William Weedon said...

Anastasia,

Indeed!

Fr. Hank,

The amazing thing to me that von Schenk positively blasts Preus for bringing Chemnitz into English. As though it were a silly waste of time. I wonder what the old fellow would think if he realized that it was the "Chemnitz revival" that alone seems to be holding back Missouri's slide into pop evangelicalism.

Anonymous said...

What von Schenk was probably reacting to was the tendency he saw very well of using the scholastics as didactic cudgels to enforce dogmatic/epistomological conformity. Men of his age had more than enough of that in prep school and seminary,,, remember von Schenks dates and who he would have had for profs at seminary.

Also Prues brought with him the tradition of the ELS of using the scholastics to intrepret the Confessions, Luther, and by that Scripture.

If von Schenk had lived long enough, he would have taken kindly to the contextual understanding of Chemnitz and Gerhard, especially, in fostering Patristic and Confessional studies, and a rich understanding what it means to be an Augsburg Catholic.

Whether all that is sufficient to avoid the slide into generic American evangleicism only time will tell.