What do you think?
Rate this book
Liebe Ist Moglich. Die Bergpredigt Im Atomzeilalter
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 14, 2024
Weiß nicht, was ich mir dabei gedacht habe. Das Buch ist recht alt und recht konservativ. Dementsprechend musste ich mich beim Lesen etwas ärgern. Allerdings gab es wenige Stellen, die ich tatsächlich interessant fand. Außerdem werden öfter Bibelstellen zitiert und tatsächlich würde ich mich gerne mehr mit der bibel auseinander setzen.
May 3, 2025
There is a fine line for an author between being confident that he has something worthwhile to say and being convinced he is the revealer of long-hidden truth. In this book, Franz Alt often lands on the wrong side of that line.
It’s not a long book, but it comes across as long-winded, for the author repeatedly hammers on his basic point that abortion and atomic armaments are the two major evils of the day (somehow connected) and that a thorough-going application of the Sermon on the Mount would be the solution to both. He reads the words of Jesus as a political document, although I was never sure exactly how to turn the sermon into a political program. Alt doesn’t seem sure either since he denies that it is a collection of laws according to which one could govern. The application appears instead to be an inner reform of the individual, even though he rejects the long tradition of personal application.
It is in this rejection of or non-engagement with the long record of intense preoccupation with the Sermon on the Mount throughout church history that Alt comes across as a guru. He writes that the official church and many Christians have struggled for two thousand years with the real teachings of Jesus and connects this to Jesus’s warning against false prophets. He explicates this as those who want to do piously rather than be pious. But in the course of revealing this “real” teaching of Jesus, Alt freely puts words in Jesus’s mouth, such as when he writes, “Jesus macht uns den inneren Zusammenhang von Abtreibung und Aufrüstung klar: die Gewalt und die Feindbilder in uns.” This might be compatible with what Jesus says, but Alt doesn’t show how he derives this thought from the words of Jesus.
Not that Alt is at a loss for words. His prose style mixes news reports (which makes this four-decade-old book seem dated), quotations from Drewermann, Jung, and others, and entire paragraphs of aphorisms. Some of these are well-stated (“konservativ sein heisst nicht, die Asche hüten, sondern die Flamme”), but I’ll be leery of quoting them, for in some cases, I recognized them as key thoughts of others, unattributed.
This book sat a long time on my shelf before I stuck it into my pocket to read on a train trip. Next, it will go to the shopping bag with books for my next trip to the used bookstore.
It’s not a long book, but it comes across as long-winded, for the author repeatedly hammers on his basic point that abortion and atomic armaments are the two major evils of the day (somehow connected) and that a thorough-going application of the Sermon on the Mount would be the solution to both. He reads the words of Jesus as a political document, although I was never sure exactly how to turn the sermon into a political program. Alt doesn’t seem sure either since he denies that it is a collection of laws according to which one could govern. The application appears instead to be an inner reform of the individual, even though he rejects the long tradition of personal application.
It is in this rejection of or non-engagement with the long record of intense preoccupation with the Sermon on the Mount throughout church history that Alt comes across as a guru. He writes that the official church and many Christians have struggled for two thousand years with the real teachings of Jesus and connects this to Jesus’s warning against false prophets. He explicates this as those who want to do piously rather than be pious. But in the course of revealing this “real” teaching of Jesus, Alt freely puts words in Jesus’s mouth, such as when he writes, “Jesus macht uns den inneren Zusammenhang von Abtreibung und Aufrüstung klar: die Gewalt und die Feindbilder in uns.” This might be compatible with what Jesus says, but Alt doesn’t show how he derives this thought from the words of Jesus.
Not that Alt is at a loss for words. His prose style mixes news reports (which makes this four-decade-old book seem dated), quotations from Drewermann, Jung, and others, and entire paragraphs of aphorisms. Some of these are well-stated (“konservativ sein heisst nicht, die Asche hüten, sondern die Flamme”), but I’ll be leery of quoting them, for in some cases, I recognized them as key thoughts of others, unattributed.
This book sat a long time on my shelf before I stuck it into my pocket to read on a train trip. Next, it will go to the shopping bag with books for my next trip to the used bookstore.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews