The danger of infertile moralism

Keeping all of God’s commandments — such a program expresses perfection. And yet it can be there to hide the dangerous illusion of Pharisaic. The name has a pejorative meaning in contemporary language. In the beginning, this is the case it was not. The Pharisees appeared to be religious reformers. During decline, they preached a return to the faithful fulfillment of the Mosaic Law and folk traditions. How come that did Jesus meet them so sharply? It’s a secret, above which we have to think about a lot. The Mosaic Law it contains God’s words and rules for how people should behave. The word is inseparable from the one who utters it and to But be perfect to whom he turns. If the love of God is forgotten and to the neighbor, the law, though divine, loses its meaning and it becomes tyrannical, an opportunity to judge the weak. The team there was a tragedy that Jesus, the personal Word of God, he was sentenced to death for the divine law. The law is not protected from this danger either gospel, taken literally, without spirit. And in that sense Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot can be explained is in it portrayed a prince who acts according to the principles of the Gospel, but he does not know the person of Christ and never turns to Heavenly Father. He ends up in an institution for the mentally ill. After all, what would the teachings of Christ be without Christ was among us, and without we’re praying: Our Father! In this context, we can also recall the religious crisis of Martin Luther. It was presented to him the ideal of “imitating Christ.” But he understood that this noble goal can become ineffective when you do we imagine that the Savior stands before us as an external pattern, almost like the image we have to reproduce in our lives. Luther sincerely admits that he would he was unable to do so. It is necessary to capture Christ “through faith “to be in us and only in cooperation with him we can think of completing the work. Ignatius of Loyola is not so far from this tendency. However, it shows much more specifically how to proceed traditionally. The first contact with Christ is really external – he reads the gospel and man imagines Christ standing in front of us. However, one acquires the words in a meditative prayer aimed at conversation with the Savior, “as a friend, he speaks with another friend.” Such a conversation then concludes with the prayer “Father Such daily meditation is essential parts of Ignatius spirituality. Ignac is convinced that only in this way will one learn to fulfill in a particular life God’s will, which is the first principle of Christian morality.