The modern man’s conception of God, compared to Luther’s
2009 October 24
The God of Kant, Schleiermacher, and Ritschl is no longer a consuming fire. If the modern man believes in God at all, he believes in him as the guarantor of his happiness. And so the thought of the existence of God has become, since the eighteenth century, a comforting thought. For Luther it was a most disturbing one. In bitter moments of grave temptation he often wished that God did not exist. For if God exists, and if he really is God, then man is lost. Created to do God’s will, and incapable of its fulfillment, he is guilty of the judgment [of God]. And how can man hope to stand before the God of heaven and his unerring judgment?
–Hermann Sasse, from “Luther and the Teaching of the Reformation” (1937) in The Lonely Way.
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