"raw choice, autonomous choice, choice for its own sake and for private ends, uncoupled from any command."

     "Our 'secular' saeculum has its own gospel. In it we announce choice itself, not choice about something. We announce raw choice, autonomous choice, choice for its own sake and for private ends, uncoupled from any command. We have taken up the idea of the self as the repository of all goodness; but this repository is not, like Mary, full of grace and gratitude. It is, like Eve, full of desires and demands. It is possessed, like Adam, of many rights; but it does not do what is right and just, or even acknowledge what is right and just. It seeks power and authority, not from and for justice, but in order to decide what “­justice” will be. It advocates progress in everything but virtue. It is not interested in virtue because it is not interested in God, the goal to which virtue leads. Thus, the mystery of lawlessness advances under ­cover of an ever-expanding positive law that no longer acknowledges any foundation for law. In the name of liberty, we are making progress in law at the expense of liberty. And so far from being grateful for the gifts of providence, we no longer know how even to make sense of the idea of “the gift,” an idea our philosophers tell us is incoherent. The economy of grace and gratitude is a currency we no longer recognize.

     "In our putative secularity, the rough draft of our response to the heavenly court has begun to take shape. Is there silence in heaven? Very well. Then let there be silence on earth also. That court shall not be named, not in public; neither shall the Christ, whose authority it has confirmed. Our secular silence is not a repentant silence. It is not a mournful silence in sackcloth and ashes like that of the Ninevites, to whom God brought Jonah that he might deliver his reluctant rebuke. It is not a prayer, but a refusal to pray. It is not a contemplation of our sins, but a refusal to allow that there is any such thing as sin—save the sin of honoring God and admonishing one another to heed the commands of God, which is now both a sin and a crime."

     Douglas Farrow, "The secret of the saeculum," First things no. 303 (May 2020):  35 (27-35).

"One must belong to an ecumenical organization in order to fail to understand that Luther was a miserable confessionalist."

"Es bedarf der Zugehörigkeit zu einer ökumenischen Organization, um nicht zu verstehen daß Luther ein elender Konfessionalist war."

     Tom [G. A.] Hardt, of the missiologist Hans-Werner Gensichen (1915-1999), who, at Damnamus:  die Verwerfung von Irrlehre bei Luther und im Luthertum des 16. Jahrhunderts (1955) 45, was apparently scandalized to discover that the doctrine (i.e. principle) of justification by faith alone had never (“nie”) been more important to Luther than the hoc est corpus meum; had never been allowed to turn communion into the merely "spiritual eating and drinking" of the Schwärmer, and thus Luther into a principled "Konfessionalist."  "Keine Kirchengemeinschaft mit Häretikern!  (Nulla communicatio in sacris cum haereticis)," Lutherische Blätter 12, no. 65 (Juli 1960):  67 (62-83).  See also p. 66.

"Every article of faith is a principle in itself and does not need to be proved by another article."

     Martin Luther at the Marburg Colloquy of 1529, according to Hermann Sasse, This is my body:  Luther's contention for the real presence in the sacrament of the altar (Minneapolis:  Augsburg, 1959), 261 (Hed[io], Coll[in], An[onymous]).  =WA 30.3, 141 (An[onymous], Coll[in]):

An.] Lutherus respondit:  Quemque articulum fidei sui ipsius principium esse, nec opus esse exemplo simili probari.

Coll.] Lutherus.  Non petimus principium, nam articulus fidei non probatur per articulum.

Anonymous]  Luther responded [that] every article of faith is its own [first] principle [(lit. a principle of itself)], and [that] it is not required [(nec opus esse) that it] be demonstrated by a comparable such [(exemplo simili)].  |  LW 38, 51:  Every article of faith is a principle in itself and does not need to be proved by a similar example.

Collin]  Luther:  We are not begging the question [(Non petimus principium, We are not in search—i.e. need—of a principle)], for [one] article of faith is not demonstrated by [another] article.  |  LW 38, 61:  We are not begging the question, for one article of faith is not proved by another.

=Walter Koehler, Das Marburger Religionsgeschpräch 1529:  Versuch einer Rekonstruktion (1929), __.  I was put onto this by Tom [G. A.] Hardt, "Keine Kirchengemeinschaft mit Häretikern!  (Nulla communicatio in sacris cum haereticis)," Lutherische Blätter 12, no. 65 (Juli 1960):  66 (62-83):  "Jeder Glaubensartikel ist sich selbst Prinzip und bedarf nicht des Beweises durch einen anderen."

     With this Luther was able to affirm the spiritual eating (manducatio spiritualis) so stressed by Zwingli and Oecolampadius without being compelled thereby—as if by an Oecolampadian "norm for the whole of [Christian] doctrine" rooted in the principle of justification by faith alone—to dispense with the doctrine of the Real Presence:  "Your argument implies this:  [that] because we affirm [(haben)] a spiritual eating, there is no need of a bodily.  I answer:  The spiritual eating we in no way deny.  Indeed, we everywhere teach and believe that it is necessary.  But by this can it not be established that the bodily is useless or unnecessary" (cf. the translation on p. 236 in Sasse).

     What he is arguing for here would seem to be an interpretation of the "This is my body" controlled by the mandatum (revelation) rather than a kind of rationalistic consistency.  And to that extent he may be right.  The consistency is surely to be sought in convenientia post factum alone (?).

'"The [ancient] catholic church was a confessional church whose harshness had nothing in common with the contemporary church of tolerance."

"The 'Great Church' invented by [Bishop Bo] Giertz and A history of the ecumenical movement 1517-1948 [(London:  S.P.C.K., 1954)] never existed.  The [ancient] catholic church was a confessional church [(Konfessionskirche)] whose harshness [(Schroffheit)] had nothing in common with a modern church of tolerance [(Toleranzkirche)].  The anathema [pronounced] against heretics and apostates was for it [(die alte Kirche)] a matter of real consequence [(eine Realität)].  Though small and inconsequential, it raised [high] the claim to be the sancta ecclesia catholica."

     Tom [G. A.] Hardt, "Keine Kirchengemeinschaft mit Häretikern!  (Nulla communicatio in sacris cum haereticis)," Lutherische Blätter 12, no. 65 (Juli 1960):  64 (62-83).  I know nothing about Prof. Hardt, who undoubtedly followed Luther in anathematizing the Roman Catholic Church.  But if so, then the anathema that he would reserve to confessional Lutheranism was, of course, also pronounced against it in the manner of that same "ancient church."

The good are afflicted with the wicked because they have failed to reprove them.

"We tend culpably to evade our responsibility when we ought to instruct and admonish them, sometimes even with sharp reproof and censure, either because the task is irksome, or because we are afraid of giving offence; or it may be that we shrink from incurring their enmity, for fear that they may hinder and harm us in worldly matters, in respect either of what we eagerly seek to attain, or of what we weakly dread to lose. . . ."

     "If anyone refrains from reproof and correction of ill-doers because he looks for a more suitable occasion, or because he fears that this will make them worse, or fears that they will hinder the instruction of others, who are weak, in a good and godly way of life, and that they will oppress them, and turn them away from the faith, in such a case the action seems to be prompted not by self-interest but by counsels of charity. What is culpable is when those whose life is different and who abhor the deed of the wicked are nevertheless indulgent to the sins of others, which they ought to reprehend and reprove, because they are concerned to avoid giving offence to them, in case they should harm themselves in respect of things which may be rightly and innocently enjoyed by good men, but which they desire more than is right for those who are strangers in this world and who fix their hope on a heavenly country."

     ". . . In fact, they are constrained by self-interest, not by the obligations of charity [(hoc est propter quaedam cupiditatis uincula, non propter officia caritatis)]."

     St. Augustine, City of God I.9, trans. Henry Bettenson.  Dodds:  "their non-intervention is the result of selfishness, and not of love."  CSEL 40.1, 15-17.

"The myth of medieval paganism"

 "The idea that something called 'paganism' existed in medieval society as a mode of conscious resistance to Christianity has proved seductive, despite having no factual basis whatsoever."

     Francis Young, "The myth of medieval paganism," First things no. 300 (February 2020):  12 (12-14).  "most culturally alien practices in popular Christianity were products of imperfectly catechized Christian cultures rather than pockets of pagan resistance" (14).

"God's life is given just where the forms of a human life are simply what they are". And as a consequence, "what they are is always more than a human person can ever tell."

     Ephraim Radner, A profound ignorance:  modern pneumatology and its anti-modern redemption (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2019), 207.