These are from my two favorite books, “Practice in Christianity” and the dual volume “For Self-Examination / Judge for Yourself”. For all my admiration and affinity with the Dane, I do often find him to be often verbose, convoluted, repetative, obscure, and indirect in his writing. I think sometimes he was trying to communicate his works in much more sophisticated, indirect, erudite, philosophical language, that even a sympathetic reader like myself has trouble following. These two works are intentionally written as more direct biblical devotional/ expositions/ exhortations, and are a bit more common/everyday language and straightforward than other of his works.
Just a few more favorite quotes for today…
" ‘If the essentially Christian is something so terrifying and appalling, how in the world can anytone think of accepting Christianity?’ Very simply (and, if you wish, very Lutheranly): Only the consciousness of sin can force one, if I dare to put it that way (from the other side of grace is the force), into this horror. And at that very same mment the essentially Christian transforms itself into and is sheer leniency, grace, love, mercy. Considered in any other way Christianity is and must be a kind of madness r the greatest horror. Admittance is only through the consciousness of sin; to want to enter by any other road is high treason against Christianty…
But sin - that you and I are sinners (the single individual), has been abolished, or it has been illicitly reduced both in life (the domestic, the civic, the ecclesiastical) and in scholarship, which has invented the doctrine of sin in general. By way of compensation they then want to help people into Christianity and keep them in it by means of all this about the world-historical, all this about the gentle teachings, the sublime and the profound, about a friend, etc.–all of which Luther would call rubbish and which is blasphemy, since it is brazen to want to fraternize with God and Christ. Only the consciousness of sin is absolute respect."
“Do not say that these are quibbling comments about words, anything but upbuilding. Believe me, it is very important for a person that his language be precise and true, becaue that means his thinking is also. Furthermore, even though understanding and speaking correctly are not everything, since acting correctly is indeed also required, yet understanding in relation to acting is like the springboard from which the diver makes his leap–the clearer, the more precise, the more passionate (in the god sense) the understanding is, the more it rises to action, or the easier it is to rise to action for the one who is to act.”