Søren Kierkegaard, his fellow Lutheran from almost a century earlier: Lutheranism [with its rhetorically strong emphasis on grace] is a corrective—but a corrective made into the norm, the whole, is eo ipso [by that very fact] confusing in the next generation (when that for which it was meant to correct no longer exists). And as long as this continues things get worse with every generation, until in the end the corrective produces the exact opposite of what was originally intended. And such, moreover, is the case. Taken by itself, as the whole of Christianity, the Lutheran corrective produces
...more