A parable for Lent
A prophetic word by Emil Brunner
During wartime blackout practices we noticed what life would be like without light, how weird everything was, how one took uncertain steps, how quickly one lost his way, how easily one collided. The blackout is said to have cost more lives in England than the war.
That may be a parable for us of what darkness in the spiritual sense means in the individual life of man and in the life of nations. You know, indeed, how it is when it is simply dark in us and around us, when we do not know in and out, when it is like a devilish darkening over our mind, and we ourselves think, feel, and do what the light shuns. That the Bible calls 'wandering in darkness.' But it can happen that one becomes accustomed to this darkness so that he does not notice how terrible, how inhuman, how contrary to sense all life then becomes. And as in individuals, so in the life of nations. Now is a blackout time in the whole world of nations, as perhaps never at all before.
For earlier one still knew that there is a God, that there is a righteousness, that finally a retribution comes, that there are holy laws and orders. But today there are millions and millions of Europeans – about the others I do not wish to speak – now who no longer know all that, who have radically struck God from their hearts and lives and who therefore live entirely in darkness and who do the works of darkness.
We see today and thank God; many who did not see it are now finally beginning to see it that one cannot live without God. But perhaps it is already too late; perhaps the darkness of godlessness must first give vent to its fury before better times can come. The power of darkness seems today to have received a free night from God that it may crush to pieces what it wills so that the nations realize to what place one comes when he abolishes God.
Selah.
Emil Brunner, I Believe in the Living God, 43-44.
Showing posts with label Emil Brunner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emil Brunner. Show all posts
Friday, April 03, 2009
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
The divine nature of love
Love emerges from God for others
Love does not inquire into the character of the recipient but it asks what the beloved needs. It does not love the other because that one is such-and-such a person but because s/he exists. In all this it is quite the opposite of natural love: it “does not seek its own.” It does not perform the characteristic natural impulse of love and life. Therefore it is basically independent of the conduct of the other person; it is not conditional but absolute. It wants nothing for itself but only for others. Therefore it is also not vulnerable. It never “reacts” but is always “spontaneous,” emerging by its own strength – rather, from the power of God. Love is the real God-likeness of man for which he has been created. In so far as love is in man he really resembles God and shows himself to be the child of God.
Selah.
A quote from Emil Brunner
Love does not inquire into the character of the recipient but it asks what the beloved needs. It does not love the other because that one is such-and-such a person but because s/he exists. In all this it is quite the opposite of natural love: it “does not seek its own.” It does not perform the characteristic natural impulse of love and life. Therefore it is basically independent of the conduct of the other person; it is not conditional but absolute. It wants nothing for itself but only for others. Therefore it is also not vulnerable. It never “reacts” but is always “spontaneous,” emerging by its own strength – rather, from the power of God. Love is the real God-likeness of man for which he has been created. In so far as love is in man he really resembles God and shows himself to be the child of God.
Selah.
A quote from Emil Brunner
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Sin is faith turned upside down
An alienation that reveals a divine origin
by Emil Brunner
Therefore, even now, man is to be understood in terms of the image of God, but as the being that is in contradiction with itself, just as it lives in contradiction to God. Contradiction is something entirely different from the absence of relationship. Even now man is entirely to be understood as God’s image – but as a perverted image; the wine of God’s love bestowed upon him has turned sour and become the vinegar of enmity with God.
Sin is faith turned upside down, and can be understood in no other way. Even so, man remains a singular being; even sin, his perversion, is something that distinguishes him from every other creature. Man is the only being that sins: this is the greatness in his misery, which in the midst of his alienation from God betrays his divine origin.
Man must be understood in terms of the contradiction between origin and fall. Precisely this, the contradiction between truth and falsehood in him, is the defining mark of current man.
It is thus that the Bible understands man… [The Bible] teaches us exactly the same things about man that we, too, must teach: that man is God’s image, but that this image is destroyed and must be renewed. Man is completely a sinner, but this sin is not a condition but a determination of his being, and as such is an act, but an act that determines man as a whole. Therefore he is the slave of his own sin, and bound in a unity with the whole of mankind in it.
A lust for autonomy that flees the healing Word of God
There is no conflict between this doctrine of origin and sin, and the scientific knowledge of our day, unless science oversteps its limits and propounds some speculation of natural philosophy – for example, materialism or determinism – as scientific teaching. In that case, however, we have no longer to do with modern science but with modern man, who conceals his lust for autonomy behind the mask of science, and seeks to exculpate himself.
All understandings of man, with the exception of the Christian one, are attempts to exculpate man, but by exculpating man, they cheapen him at the same time, by robbing him of his personal character.
Only the biblical understanding of man – the interpretation of him in terms of the Word of God that became flesh in Jesus Christ – does not exculpate him but condemns him. But in condemning, it maintains his personal character. And the Bible condemns him at the same moment it acquits him of guilt. For the same Jesus Christ, the same Word of God in whom we know ourselves as sinners, is also the One who takes this sin from us.
Selah.
Emil Brunner, The Word of God and Modern Man, 45-46.
by Emil Brunner
Therefore, even now, man is to be understood in terms of the image of God, but as the being that is in contradiction with itself, just as it lives in contradiction to God. Contradiction is something entirely different from the absence of relationship. Even now man is entirely to be understood as God’s image – but as a perverted image; the wine of God’s love bestowed upon him has turned sour and become the vinegar of enmity with God.
Sin is faith turned upside down, and can be understood in no other way. Even so, man remains a singular being; even sin, his perversion, is something that distinguishes him from every other creature. Man is the only being that sins: this is the greatness in his misery, which in the midst of his alienation from God betrays his divine origin.
Man must be understood in terms of the contradiction between origin and fall. Precisely this, the contradiction between truth and falsehood in him, is the defining mark of current man.
It is thus that the Bible understands man… [The Bible] teaches us exactly the same things about man that we, too, must teach: that man is God’s image, but that this image is destroyed and must be renewed. Man is completely a sinner, but this sin is not a condition but a determination of his being, and as such is an act, but an act that determines man as a whole. Therefore he is the slave of his own sin, and bound in a unity with the whole of mankind in it.
A lust for autonomy that flees the healing Word of God
There is no conflict between this doctrine of origin and sin, and the scientific knowledge of our day, unless science oversteps its limits and propounds some speculation of natural philosophy – for example, materialism or determinism – as scientific teaching. In that case, however, we have no longer to do with modern science but with modern man, who conceals his lust for autonomy behind the mask of science, and seeks to exculpate himself.
All understandings of man, with the exception of the Christian one, are attempts to exculpate man, but by exculpating man, they cheapen him at the same time, by robbing him of his personal character.
Only the biblical understanding of man – the interpretation of him in terms of the Word of God that became flesh in Jesus Christ – does not exculpate him but condemns him. But in condemning, it maintains his personal character. And the Bible condemns him at the same moment it acquits him of guilt. For the same Jesus Christ, the same Word of God in whom we know ourselves as sinners, is also the One who takes this sin from us.
Selah.
Emil Brunner, The Word of God and Modern Man, 45-46.