Highlights
Task
I wonder if you’ve ever considered how strange it is that the educational and character-shaping structures of our culture expose us but a single time in our lives to the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, Herodotus, Augustine, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Rousseau, Newton, Racine, Darwin, Kant, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Einstein, and dozens of others of the same rank, but expose us annually, monthly, weekly, and even daily to the ideas of persons like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha. Why is it, do you think, that we need quarterly lectures on charity, while a single lecture on the laws of thermodynamics is presumed to last us a lifetime? Why is the meaning of Christmas judged to be so difficult of comprehension that we must hear a dozen explications of it, not once in a lifetime, but every single year, year after year after year? Perhaps even more to the point, why do the pious (who already know every word of whatever text they find holy) need to have it repeated to them week after week after week, and even day after day after day? I’ll wager that, if there are physicists listening to me here tonight, you do not keep a copy of Newton’s Principia on your bedside table. I’ll wager that the astronomers among you do not reach on waking for a copy of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orblum coelestium, that the geneticists among you do not spend a daily hour in reverential communion with The Double Helix, that the anatomists among you do not make a point of reading a passage a night from De huniani corporis fabrica, that the sociologists among you do not carry with you everywhere a treasured copy of Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. But you know very well that hundreds of millions of people thumb daily through holy books that will be read from cover to cover not a dozen times during a lifetime but a dozen dozen. Have you ever wondered why it is the duty of the clergy of so many sects to read the Divine Office —daily? Why the same affirmations of faith are repeated word for word in so many religious communities around the world—daily? Is it so difficult to remember that Allah is One or that Christ died for our sins that it must be reiterated at least once every day throughout life?
Of course we know that these things aren’t in the least difficult to remember. And we know that the pious don’t go to church every Sunday because they’ve forgotten that Jesus loves them but rather because they’ve not forgotten that Jesus loves them. They want to hear it again and again and again and again. In some sense or other, they need to hear it again and again and again and again. They can live without hearing the laws of thermodynamics ten thousand times, but for some reason, they cannot live without hearing the laws of their gods ten thousand times. Verily I say unto you . . . again and again and again A few years ago, when I began speaking to audiences, I had the rather naive idea that it would be sufficient—indeed entirely sufficient—to say each thing exactly once. Only gradually did I understand that saying a thing once is tantamount to saying it not at all. It is indeed sufficient for people to hear the laws of thermodynamics once, and to understand that they’re written down somewhere, should they ever be needed again, but there are other truths, of a different human order, that must be enunciated again and again and again—in the same words and in different words: again and again and again. As you know, I’ve not spoken at Der Bau before this night. Yet some of you may have heard me speak elsewhere, and you may say to yourselves, “Haven’t I heard him say these things in Salzburg or Dresden or Stuttgart or Prague or Wiesbaden?”
The answer to that question is yes. And when Jesus spoke in Galilee, there were those who asked: “Didn’t I hear him say these things in Capernaum or Jerusalem or Judaea or Gennesaret or Caesarea Phillippi?” Of course they heard him say them in all these places. All the public statements attributed to Jesus in the gospels could be delivered in three - 114 - hours or less, and if he didn’t repeat himself everywhere he went, then he was silent during ninety-nine percent of his public life. Anywhere in the world Anywhere in the world, East or West, you can walk up to a stranger and say, “Let me show you how to be saved,” and you’ll be understood. You may not be believed or welcomed when you speak these words, but you will surely be understood. The fact that you’ll be understood should astonish you, but it doesn’t, because you’ve been prepared from childhood by a hundred thousand voices—a million voices—to understand these words yourself. You know instantly what it means to be “saved,” and it doesn’t matter in the least whether you believe in the salvation referred to. You know in addition, as a completely distinct matter, that being saved involves some method or other. The method might be a ritual—baptism, extreme unction, the sacrament of penance, the performance of ceremonial works, or anything at all. It might, on the other hand, be an inner action of repentance, love, faith, or meditation. Again in addition, and again as a completely distinct matter, you know that the method of salvation being proposed is universal: It can be used by everyone and works for everyone. Yet again: You know that the method has not been discovered, developed, or tested in any scientific laboratory; either God has revealed it to someone or someone has discovered it in a supranormal state of consciousness. Although initially received by divine means, the method is nonetheless transmittable by normal means, which explains why it’s possible for a perfectly ordinary individual to be offering the method to others. But all this barely scratches the surface of what is meant when someone says.
Let me show you how to be saved.” A complex and profound worldview is implicit in such a statement. According to this worldview, the human condition is such that everyone is born in an unsaved state and remains unsaved until the requisite ritual or inner action is performed, and all who die in this state either lose their chance for eternal happiness with God or fail to escape the weary cycle of death and rebirth. Because we’ve been schooled from birth to understand all this, we’re not at all puzzled to hear someone say, “Let me show you how to be saved.” Salvation is as plain and ordinary to us as sunrise or rainfall. But now try to imagine how these words would be received in a culture that had no notion that people were born in an unsaved state, that had no notion that people need to be saved. A statement like this, which seems plain and ordinary to us, would be completely meaningless and incomprehensible to them, in part and in whole. Not a word of it would make sense to them. Imagine all the work you’d have to do to prepare the people of this culture for your statement. You’d have to persuade them that they (and indeed all humans) are born in a state in which they require salvation. You’d have to explain to them what being unsaved means—and what being saved means. You’d have to persuade them that achieving salvation is vitally important—indeed the most important thing in the world. You’d have to convince them that you have a method that assures success. You’d have to explain where the method came from and why it works. You’d have to assure them that they can master this method, and that it will work as well for them as it does for you. If you can imagine the difficulty you would encounter in this enterprise, you can imagine the difficulty I encounter every time I address an audience. It’s seldom possible for me simply to open my mouth and say the things that are on my mind. Rather, I must begin by laying the groundwork for ideas that are obvious to me but fundamentally alien to my listeners.
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