Confessions of Unbelievers: Goethe

Final Home of Goethe

I am going to have to come up with a consistent title of this series of blogs and these great quotes from men of the past.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in English was a German writer and according to George Eliot, “Germany’s greatest man of letters… and the last true polymath to walk the earth.” Goethe’s works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, humanism and science. Goethe’s magnum opus, lauded as one of the peaks of world literature, is the two-part drama Faust. Goethe’s other well-known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Goethe,  admirer of intellectual and aesthetic aspects of Bible:

It is a belief in the Bible, the fruits of deep meditation, which has served me as the guide of my moral and literary life.  No criticism will be able to perplex the confidence which we have entertained of a writing whose contents have stirred up and given life to our vital energy by its own.  The farther the ages advance in civilization, the more will the bible be used.

As with any topic here we are open to your comments below or would you pass it on through a reading service?

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More “Christian Thought” from 1885

The following thoughts come from non-Christian men.  These statements are found in Christian Thought, a book published in 1885.  I marvel today, 2009, at how open and frankly unbiased men were to express themselves this way in that day and before.

They are entirely free from all bias in favor of Christianity.  And yet these all make concessions, which, if admitted and pressed to their logical and legitimate results, render it far more unreasonable to deny that Christ and the Bible are what they claim to be than to admit these claims.

Deems, Devins and Howe are talking about men such as Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Rousseau, Daniel Webster, De Tocqueville, Napoleon Bonaparte, Denis Diderot, Goethe, Matthew Arnold, Professor Huxley, Celsus, Lucian, Prophyry, Julian the Apostate, Spinoza, Thomas Chubb, Pecaut, Fichte, Richter, David F. Strauss, F. C. Baur, Paulus, Byron, Gregg, Thomas Carlyle, James Anthony Froude, Thomas Decker, Charles dickens, William Shakespeare, Lecky, Theodore Parker, Frances P. Cobbe, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Sumner, and Ernest Renan.

Many of these statements or quotes of well known men I will list here and have some comments.

In fact,  because I love Napoleon Bonaparte I will give yet another of his quotes.  Napoleon Bonaparte, wrote in exile:

The Bible contains a complete series of facts and of historical men to explain time and eternity such as no other religion has to offer.  If it is not the true religion, one is very excusable in being deceived; for everything in it is grand and worthy of God.  The more I consider the Gospel, the more I am assured that there is nothing there which is not beyond the march of events and above the human mind.  Even the impious themselves have never dared to deny the sublimity of the Gospel which inspires them with a sort of compulsory veneration.  What happiness that book procures for those who believe it!!!!

Thank you Mr. Bonaparte!!!

In many writings of the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries I see the word “sublimity” often.   I had a general understanding of it but just looked it up.  Here is what it means.

1. Characterized by nobility; majestic.

2. a. Of high spiritual, moral, or intellectual worth.

b. Not to be excelled; supreme.

3. Inspiring awe; impressive.

I hope that helps.

Please give us your comments on these men or on their considerations of Christ and the Bible.

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Confessions of Unbelievers

I recently came across this book:

Christian Thought: Lectures and Papers on Philosophy, Christian Evidence, Biblical Elucidation … By Charles Force Deems, John Bancroft Devins, American Institute of Christian Philosophy, Amory Howe Bradford Published by W. B. Ketcham., 1885

and I found many gems in there in a chapter titled:  Concessions of Unbelievers.   I want to share some of the quotes from this work of the late 1800’s because we face some of the same people today.

I love what one of the authors shared regarding a view of unbelievers and Jesus.

If they will only concede of Jesus Christ that he is the best and purest man that ever lived–the highest type of manhood of which we have any record–that is all we desire of them; we can then prove, in view of His faultless humanity and of His divine claims, that His divinity must follow as an inevitable conclusion. If they, again, will only admit as to the Bible that it is the best book in all the literature of the world in its moral influence upon mankind individually and collectively, that is all we desire of them; we can then prove, in view of its character and its claims, that its divine inspiration and authority must follow as a necessary result.

I have quoted Napoleon in this blog if not in howtoknowgod.wordpress.com.  However in Christian Thought,  I found a more complete statement by Napoleon that is wonderful.  I have decided to use it first in these confessions.  Here it is in an observation by one who is becoming a favorite author of mine.

“Napoleon Bonaparte,” says Dr. Schaff, “reasoning from the overpowering authority and dignity of Christ as a teacher, from the amazing result of His peaceful mission and the imperishable nature of His kingdom as contrasted with the vanity of all human conquests and secular empires, justly inferred that Christ was more than man, that He was truly divine, and that His divinity is the key which unlocks the mysteries of Christianity.”  “I know men,”  said Napoleon,  “and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man.  Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires, and the gods of others religions.  That resemblance does not exist.  There is between Christianity and other religions the distance of infinity.  Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and myself all founded empires.  But on what did we rest the creations of our genius?  Upon sheer force.  Jesus Christ alone found His empire upon live; and , at this hour millions of men will die for Him.  In every other existence but that of Christ how many imperfections.  From the first day to the last He is the same, always the same; majestic and simple; infinitely firm and infinitely gentle.  he proposes to our faith a series of mysteries, and commands with authority that we should believe them, giving no other reason that those tremendous words , ‘I am God.’  What audacity, what sacrilege, what blasphemy, in that declaration, if it were not true!”

Napoleon did not believe but he recognized the supreme and knew there was something awesome about the Man, Jesus of Nazareth.