Lecture XXXIII (Nr. 0427)
Facs
Transcript
[422]
would fall under the same problem as the a and the b movements. It would not allow IN ITSELF the protest AGAINST itself. But this is just what makes c Protestant, that it permits, by its very nature--and therefore ASKS for, by it's very nature, within itself--the PROTEST against itself.
How is this possible? This is possible only because Protestantism in its origin was in the d of the Roman church, it still has preserved a lot of the e f--in traditions, in doctrines, in cult, in ethics--but at the same g, it has exploded and disrupted the authoritarian and, spiritually speaking, totalitarian structure of the Roman church. It has produced h which tried to continue the original Christian tradition, especially the biblical one, and the early one, but which did not subject [i.e. submit] to any infallibility, either of the i or of the Protestant j, in interpreting the k. Now this was decisive. And this made it possible for l to get a quite different relationship to m. I once wrote the sentence-- and I quote it since that time, sometimes--that Protestantism has a pathos for the n, a o for the secular. Why? Because it belongs to the Protestant principle to see p related to the secular as much as to the sacred--we discussed that in the beginning of the lectures last semester when I spoke of the presence of the q in every r action. This was a Protestantism statement, a consequence of the Protestant principle. Therefore Protestantism is able to subject itself to the criticism which comes from the secular culture--in s, the t, u, and all other forms of man's spiritual v. At the same time,