Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at recognizing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means old books.
Fulfilling the law by prioritizing your own is not hating your brother, as many suppose. On the contrary, by adulterating God’s Law, it is modern equality which makes the love of many grow cold around us.
In our country, the Church is pressured to refrain from teaching the whole counsel of God’s Word when it contradicts the informal, but still real, American religion. I term this attempt to place the Christian Church on a reservation The American Interim.
Luther consistently maintained that no one could force faith; however, outward suppression of blasphemy and the preaching of false doctrine were distinct from compelling faith. Luther believed that only the Word of God could cure heresy, and that private false belief was an inward matter not to be dealt with by the magistrate.
Once we allow the teachings of men to subsume and replace God’s commandments, we may allow anything. Once our smartphones teach us more than the Bible, we may be taught to obey or to think or to feel or to denounce anything. If we are the world’s mouthpieces, we will not speak for God.
The outlandish argument that the Two Kingdoms somehow coexist as two self-contained silos was foreign to our fathers.