Thursday, September 30, 2010
A Great Quote from Luther
"Where these two teachings, the Law and the Gospel, stay bright and clear and are correctly understood, there the sun and the moon, the two great lights which God has created to rule the day and the night send forth their rays. There light and darkness can be distinguished. There Gospel is the sun; the Law is the moon. The moon looks like a red-hot kettle when the sun does not shine on it. Without the Gospel the Law is ugly and terrible. But when the sun shines on the moon, the moon has a bright, white light. The moon rules the night; the sun rules the day. The Law serves this temporal life; the Gospel serves eternal life. As long as these two lights shine, one can distinguish day from night, light from darkness. But when these two lights are gone, nothing but night and blindness and darkness prevail."
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1 comment:
"The moon looks like a red-hot kettle when the sun does not shine on it. Without the Gospel the Law is ugly and terrible."
Martin Luther's moon/sun analogy for the Law/Gospel should be viewed assuming the scientific understanding that existed back then. Of course what Luther was describing is a total lunar eclipse.
The "red-hot kettle" look actually is caused by sunshine, but it is the sunlight that has passed through the earth's atmosphere, which scatters most of the blue light (giving us our blue-looking sky), leaving the refracted reddish light to strike the moon and be reflected back to the nighttime observers on earth. Clouds, dust, and volcanic ash in the atmosphere around the circumference of the earth can cause the reddish appearance to vary from dark brown to yellow/orange color.
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