Christian Life and Witness. Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf

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СКАЧАТЬ matter what one does and has the privilege of doing righteousness in obedience to God. Augustine is quick to note that though freed from the inevitability of sin, Christians continue to sin in fact. Christians still require daily forgiveness of sins, since in this life one continues to struggle against sin and sin always remains a possibility. In this life Christians are always sinners who are nevertheless justified by grace through Jesus Christ. Luther had a great deal to say about this!

4. It is very interesting that Zinzendorf should use the phrase “evil inclination” here. It has a long history in the Jewish tradition. Since ancient times rabbis have spoken of two inclinations in each person. The yetzer ha-tov, the good inclination, and the yetzer ha-rah, the bad inclination, are said to strive for mastery of the heart of every person. Paul seems to have been thinking in this tradition in Romans 7. One wonders where Zinzendorf picked up this way of talking. It may have been from rabbis and Jews he knew, or it might simply have come from his reflection on Paul’s writings in the New Testament.

5. Zinzendorf’s point turns on the distinction between mere civil righteousness and righteousness before God. One could be blameless before the worldly court of law, but at the same time be utterly damned as wicked before God. Since God looks upon the heart and motive, true obedience means doing God’s will with a pure and joyful heart with no regard for consequences or rewards. It means loving and obeying God with abandon and purely for God’s own sake. One’s civil righteousness has only an ambiguous and uncertain relationship to that!

      The Second Speech (26 February 1738)

      Jesus!

      And there is no other name given to human beings, by which we can be saved (Acts 4:12). It is our fortress and our free city to which we must flee for deliverance (Proverbs 18:10; Numbers 35:15, 28). Very few people understand this. The angel of God told Mary what it meant: “You shall call his name Jesus; because he will save (deliver) his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).

      The explanation and exposition of this name was necessary for two reasons, first because the Jews hoped out of their particular feelings for the Messiah as king, and saw [the matter] only from [the perspective of] their external affliction, burden, and trouble, as people are generally so created by nature that they know of no other torment than bodily burdens and public nuisances, and are difficult to convince that sin is the greatest affliction, so that the prophet marvels: “What do the people complain about? Each one grumbles against his sins” (Lamentations 3:39). Secondly, [the explanation] was necessary because otherwise they could have made the deduction from old examples of divine rescue, [that] their Shiloh was even one of the ancient helpers, whom God so often sent to them when they were in trouble and whom they asked him to send: those [helpers] were the Judges, who delivered the people from their enemies, and renewed the lost rule of God time and again among the people; therefore they were also called the saviors of the people.

      The Jews might easily have thought of the name in terms of the yoke of the Romans. Therefore, the old prophets said, “Your king comes to you meekly” (Zechariah 9:9). With that the idea of Gideon and Samson and Jephthah and Barak is cancelled. Consequently, John was sent to make clear to the people that the promised salvation consisted in something different, namely in the forgiveness of sins (Luke 1:77). And on the basis of this first principle the angel, too, testified that the Savior will deliver his people from the misery, rule and power of sin. “He appeared that he might take away our sins” (l John 3:5).

But who are the people he will deliver? Here the Jews will be properly understood, to whom he chiefly professed his loyalty. “I am not sent, except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24). “He came to his own, to his own people” (John 1:11). But his office nowhere carried less weight than in his fatherland and among his own people, and the Jews did not accept him as their Messiah; because they wanted to have a physical king of Israel, who would be no lackey of the Roman Overseers, like the four princes1 who had to carry on with cunning and politics, but rather [a king] who would make the people prosperous through a declared earthly kingdom; thus the Gentiles were chosen for the spiritual kingdom, yes the whole world, and now the word “his people” has a great and wide extent. “I have still other sheep,” says our Savior, “Who are not of this fold, who I must bring here” (John 10:16).

      We are not of the Jewish line and fold, but rather by grace came to it, and shall in a certain degree fill that position. Therefore, Matthew 28:19 says, “Go out into all the world, and preach the Gospel to all creatures, beginning in Jerusalem”; and Acts 1:8 says, “You shall preach in Jerusalem, and in the whole of Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” That was the Savior’s wish and desire, because he had come to cast a fire upon the earth that it might soon be kindled. He is a Savior for all people (1 Timothy 4:10). But his believers experience, enjoy, and make use of it. The apostles extol salvation in all their speeches and writings, so that everyone who wants to have it might possess an interest in it and hope for it. Since Jesus is the universal Restorer of the whole human community, and a propitiation not only for our sins, but rather for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:2). The old fence and dividing wall is struck down, the gulf is filled in, in order that even those who are far away might become nearer through the blood of Christ (Ephesians 2:14, 17).

      This is not opposed to the sayings of John 17:2 and Hebrews 7:25, that he does not intercede for the whole world, but rather for his faithful ones. Because that was a Will and Testament, in which he appoints heirs and makes a bequest to be carried out. But soon after on the cross he thought not only of his own who were in the world, whom he loved to the end, but rather he also thought of the crucifiers, of his enemies, of the greatest sinners, of evildoers, and prayed for them all (Isaiah 53:12). The first demonstration of the answer [to his prayer] appeared in his nearest neighbor, who converted on account of Jesus’ intercession and became his friend.

But what is the sin from which he will deliver us? Everyone knows and feels that sin is something neither good nor happy for humanity. Thus, one does not first need its description in terms of the Law; but on the authority of the Gospel one can show it in summary, from John 16. Sin is not to trust in Jesus, when one either directly hates the Savior (John 15:18, 19), or on account of one’s fleshly mind has neither heart nor desire for him and his community (Romans 8:7). This enmity of unbelief goes so far that children and servants of God in whom one notices nothing otherwise offensive, indeed [in whom] great kindness is noticed, are hated only because they stand surely with him: “We cannot tolerate him before our eyes, he prides himself on being God’s child” (Wisdom of Solomon 2:12–16).2 “You must be hated by everyone on account of my name” (Matthew 10:22). Autos ephra.3

Not only in the time of the pagans was it said, “A good man; but bad because a Christian.”4 That is to say, he would be an upright man, if only he weren’t a so-called Christian. But this sentiment is held in the very midst of Christendom. As is generally known , it is no particular merit or quality for a follower of Jesus to stick to the book. How little honor is gotten with the message of Jesus? How much insult and pressure on the other hand are bound up with it?

      To be sure, not many people pay attention to the witnesses of Jesus, because to these witnesses love for Christ’s cross and bliss with their Lord is more dear to them than anything; they know that he himself was treated no better, that he was persecuted first and most of all (John 15:18), and that their humiliation is nothing compared to the contempt which he had to experience in his life (“We took no notice of him,” says Isaiah in the name of the Jews, “He was the most despised and least esteemed”; see 53:3), compared to the affront which he still daily has to suffer from the world. And if Paul says СКАЧАТЬ