Ten Commandments Reflections

  HAVING FAITH IN THE HERD BY DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS Luther identifies many kinds of righteousness, for instance the righteousness of the emperor, the Torah, the parents, and so on. But "over and above all these there is the righteousness of faith or Christian righteousness, which is to be distinguished most carefully from all the others. For they are all contrary to this righteousness, both because they proceed from the laws of emperors, the traditions of the pope, and the commandments of God, and because they consist in our own works and can be achieved by us with 'purely natural endowments,' as the scholastics teach, or from a gift of God. These kinds of righteousness of works, too, are gifts of God, as are all the things we have." According to Luther, the righteousness of the various works are active while the righteousness of faith as Luther explains it is passive; God works through the person. "For here we work nothing, render nothing to God; we only received...

THE FIRST TABLE OF THE LAW BY DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS  The sort of religious fundamentalism that would really or virtually conjoin church and state in unholy matrimony that they might live in the sin of theocracy is obviously the greatest threat to human liberty and world peace today. From that ungodly constitution certain legitimate Christian fundamentalists disqualify themselves by rendering unto Caesar his worldly due and unto their god their spiritual faith, wherefore we exclude them so that we may speak only of the monstrous offspring of the marriage of church and state, called by Thomas Paine a "mule-animal." "All religions are in their nature kind and benign," quoth Paine in  Rights of Man , ".... How is it that they lose their native mildness, and become morose and intolerant? ... By engendering the church with the state, a sort of mule-animal, capable only of destroying, and not of breeding up, is produced, called  the Church established by Law . It is a ...