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Venal Soul (Chapter One) Torrent Full

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What is the opposite of grace? The opposite of faith is the belief that God's commandments are difficult or that they are easy to obey but that sin does not, and cannot, touch the heart. In other words, the opposite of faith is unbelief, and faith is God's gift of grace. It is hard to decide how far Luther's stance on this matter was inconsistent with the peculiar tenor of his thinking. If he meant that God had not created man to be religious, or if he made no room for the doctrine of original sin, then he committed himself by the usual twist that the conditions of our salvation demand a certain amount of systematic theology, and that we know from experience that any theology that does not earn its place is useless to the soul. If he meant that man's happiness was not in any way conditioned by what he thought about God, or if he made no room for the doctrine of original sin, then his metaphysics of the heart, because it depended on the idea of God's love, could not be consistent with his system.

The foundation of this was his theory of the atonement. On this Luther thought that the atonement must be understood and applied in an exclusively Christian fashion, as the only adequate answer to the query how God has come to be what he is. He believed that the why of the atonement had been shrouded in mystery because of the partial ignorance of the pagan philosophers. If why the world is as it is is a mystery, why God is as he is not only a mystery but inexplicable, since the only essential part of the world is that it is intelligible. Moreover, as he had previously pointed out, no one could know the world directly because of what he had called sin's "intellectual blindness." The how the atonement was to be applied could only be grasped by faith; its ultimate why could be known only by intuition. Moreover, this was not a matter of simply offering another satisfactory theory of the nature of sin. For sin was seen to be in the very structure of the world. It was the exile of the soul from the world of God in Adam which gave it the potential to degenerate; forgiveness was the restoration of this state of exile; and all the cruelties of the world were its results. To redeem us from this, atonement must consist of a full engagement of the very world with God, bringing sinners to a new spiritual union with him; to restore God's creation, the atonement must be an act of God's creative power making something new. It is this which we see in the miracles recorded in the Gospels. Indeed, it is impossible to speak of the miracles recorded in the Gospels except in terms of the atonement, because they are the very proof of the atonement. So Luther came in a sense to see the atonement as a doctrine of creation, and not simply as a theory of punishment. Yet the new creation of the world was not of God acting on it at all; it was of God acting in it at his will. 84d34552a1