This is the last quote in Mockingbird’s Holl series from The Distinctive Elements in Christianity (1937). Next week we will feature Holl‘s lecture and book, The Reconstruction of Morality.
Here the great one does away with distinctions between people. He also references by strange advanced knowledge a novel by James Gould Cozzens. Most important, Karl Holl here observes that Christ’s conception of God came to people like an awakening from a dream. As always, the emphases are Mockingbird’s, and the excerpt is from pages 29-30.
This conception of God which Jesus taught, though it ran so sharply counter to all natural religious notions, still possessed its hidden, its irresistible strength. It went deeper than any other conception of God. For it spoke straight to the conscience. Was it not after all convincing that he who would aspire to fellowship with God must take his stand not on heroism, but unconditionally on God’s own moral nature, on God’s great goodness? For him who earnestly sought to do this, the distinction between the just and the unjust, the pure and the impure was dissolved. … The admonition ‘know thyself’ now found its full significance.”
“He who grasped this was like a person awakening from a dream.”
No wonder that some revival movements have been called Great Awakenings.
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2 responses to “Karl Holl on Morality as Awakening”
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Only at Mockingbird could we have an intersection of Abba and Reformation Christianity. I love it.
Thanks for the continuing series of Karl Holl. It's such a comfort and inspiration.
This is a great quote.
I've been working back through Holl recently and his is one that like few others highlights the importance of the law/gospel distinction to the current state of "God is love" theology.
For example. This quote: For him who earnestly sought to do this, the distinction between the just and the unjust, the pure and the impure was dissolved. … The admonition 'know thyself' now found its full significance."
could lead one to believe that Holl would affirm some sort of negative role to the "just condemnation" of the law; however, nothing could be further from the case. To "know thyself" is not to reach a new level or sense of belonging or belovedness–no matter what the Eastern Orthodox say—but rather to become aware that one is a rebellious creature straining against the confines of God's law and in need of total absolution/redemption. He saw this is much less abstract than any sense of progressive beatification or something like that. People are in need of saving from the outside; ours is just such a religion!
It was just this leveling fact, the universal condemnation of the "ought" that exists in the conscience that is, for Holl, the constitutive element of Luther's development of the idea of conscience. He writes in What did Luther Understand by Religion ,
"Luther's religion is a 'religion of conscience" in the most pronounced sense of the word, with all the urgency and the personal character belonging to it–namely, his unique experience of the conflict between a keen sense of responsibility and the unconditional, absolute validity of the divine will. . . the more profoundly a person is touched by the obligation and the more sharply it contrasts with one's 'natural' desires, the more lucid and unambiguous is the revelation. It is a basic principle with Luther that it is not what a person freely devises or "chooses" that bears the stamp of the divine but rather what is imposed by a higher order, something that has to be done.". . . "the concept of God, and specifically of a personal God, is for Luther directly connected with the sense of obligation."
(This is echoed in A. Schlatter–strange bedfellows:)
In other words, the distinctions between people–the categories of just and unjust, pure and impure–exist as realities of this broken world. They exist both within ourselves and when measured against any "objective" standard (ie. Law). First and foremost, we are those who react rightly (go away from me) to the sollen–the "should"—and it is this voice (Romans 1&2)that must be overcome by God–not by fiat, but by redeeming action.
This is why people who want to emphasize the "brotherhood of man," or something like that, without an understanding of what actually constitutes that brother/sisterhood–ie.the need for absolution in the conscience from resentment of the sense of obligation (to name just one:)–are, from a Gospel perspective, sorely misguided.
Anyway, just some thoughts—thanks for the great quote!