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...

  Painting by Darwin Leon DIREMPTION & SALVATION BY DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS A ''diremption'' is a violent divorce or split, sometimes identified as a "fall" into self-consciousness, which presents an objective world in opposition to the willing subject, now conscious of itself as an independence restrained, therefore, at once, dependent for its existence on outside forces to which it must respond in one way or another to perpetuate its existence. Hence human self-consciousness is, in its radical division or the division at its root, is a moral division, a consciousness of good and evil that is not identical to the awareness of pleasure of pain that other animals experience - to humans, ''good'' might be painful, while ''evil'' might be pleasurable. In other words, the individual is separated from its mother and is born or falls into the world where it soon discovers it is not omnipotent, that it is opposed to an it or object or...