>We scarcely know what we owe to Luther, and the Reformation in general. We are freed from the fetters of spiritual narrowmindedness; we have, in consequence of our increasing culture, become capable of turning back to the fountain head, and of comprehending Christianity in its purity. We have, again, the courage to stand with firm feet upon God's earth, and to feel ourselves in our divinely-endowed human nature. Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences go on gaining in depth and breadth, and the human mind expand as it may, it will never go beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity as it glistens and shines forth in the Gospel!
>But the better we Protestants advance in our noble development, so much the more rapidly will the Catholics follow us. As soon as they feel themselves caught up by the ever-extending enlightenment of the time, they must go on, do what they will, till at last the point is reached where all is but one.
>The mischievous sectarianism of the Protestants will also cease, and with it the hatred and hostile feeling between father and son, sister and brother; for as soon as the pure doctrine and love of Christ are comprehended in their true nature, and have become a vital principle, we shall feel ourselves as human beings, great and free, and not attach especial importance to a degree more or less in the outward forms of religion. Besides, we shall all gradually advance from a Christianity of words and faith, to a Christianity of feeling and action.
Gay. Either he was really young or writing cryptically for dummies. Bro was a pagan. He knew Christianity was bad at the roots.
He said this in supreme old age in his conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann. If you think Goethe was anti-Christian you're literally moronic.
Goethe was anti-Christian
Do you have an iq of 90? Are you unable to express yourself beyond just restating your beliefs in brief sentences? Your understanding of Goethe is wrong, make an argument contrary to that or accept it.
Didn't he convert to Islam? He was a resentful gay intellectual who thought maybe Islam would've prevented his gayness.
No, and he was never resentful nor gay. Maybe you are thinking of Andrew Tate.
He was definitely gay and he also said some positive things about Islam. It is a debate whether he converted or not.
>he also said some positive things about Islam.
This is true
>He was definitely gay
Where are you finding this information?
>Where are you finding this information?
I'm a genius.
>that pic
brb converting to paganism.
He was overly optimistic. I still like it.
Cope.
>Goethe is one of the smartest men to live he just CAN'T be positive towards Christianity because I don't like it and I'm very smart therefore other smart people can't like it either no matter what they actually wrote or said about it
moron
He never wrote that.
> enlightened liberal Christianity is le good
Gibberish trash
Just look what German Protestantism turned into.
>Just look what German Protestantism turned into.
Nazism?
Nazis aren't Christian. Is it really too difficult for you people to understand that Satanic subverts have no moral imperative to be honest, and frequently label themselves as Christian or wear a Christian mask to one degree or other for their subversive and destructive purposes? There also are those who, knowing the truth of God, still do not wish to give up their own wickedness, and so invent for themselves apostate rules, regulations, sects, and the like in order to permit their ultimately Satanic practices to continue without having the courage to confess their betrayal of the Gospel.
>Nazis aren't Christian
Neither are feminist or lgbt Protestants.
I never said anything about feminists or lgbt. Get your head out of your butt, /misc/tard.
Maybe you should have checked what the post you were replying to was replying to before you go on your rant.
I was replying to the implication Nazism is a continuation of Protestantism. Which I refuted. You lost track of the point in my reply, not the other way around.
The point of the post you were replying to was that if any movement a group identifying as Protestants supports becomes the continuation of Protestantism then one could far easier claim that for Nazism than for modern Progressivism. Hence showing the stupidity of claiming modern Progressives are the result of Protestantism. You utter fricking idiot.
>t. guy who got lost in a single post
Actually, if anything, I already addressed the fact that they are not Christian. Your reading comprehension is lacking.
Exactly, Nazis are just like universalist and Gay churches
I think he means those ultra-liberal protestant churches who are basically exactly like the secular libs. Though german catholics are not the slightest bit less libtarded than german protestants, either.
my local protestant parish got rid of a pastor for being gay
That's a lot of words to say nothing of substance.
>Two more weeks and we'll achieve Real Christianity™
Actually, it's
>One more eternity and we'll finally achieve true Christianity
>finally, we are free from the tyranny of the Church
>...
>finally, we are free from the tyranny of religion, just like... let people do what they want lol?
Oh you think Goethe was a Christian?
Don’t read his private letters then.
unreal how much Christcuck cope there is on this board. Trads have been the new fedoras for like a decade now
He called himself a non-Christian because he thought that what it meant to be a Christian was to accept one of the many denominations, which he did not. He was an enlightenment liberal to a tee but his religious beliefs were close to those of Thomas Jefferson or Leo Tolstoy, who nobody knew ties to say are not Christian.
Besides, all Westerners are in reality Christians, whether they profess that or not. Their sentiments on all matters reveal that.
Why are the Germans so shitty at Christianity?
Why are the Germans so shitty in general?
Because they are Agarthans
>t. Austrian Catholic carpetbagger Catholic majority districts all voted against in the final election
I disagree with Goethe on Christianity I don't think Faust should've been saved regardless of how much is murdered child bride prayed for his salvation
How does this "solve" Christianity? He just says Catholicism is narrow-minded and that the outward forms of the religion don't matter.
But they do matter. That's what Protestants will never understand. The chants, the incense, the ritual, the symbolism, the sacred objects, the special prayers, the festivals, the holy days, the fasts, the marriage and funeral rites -- all of this is important. Religion is symbolic at its core.
Christianity is not just a moral attitude in the hearts of individual believers. Yes, there is that part, of course. But the communal, political, symbolic manifestations of the religion - which Goethe would call "narrow-mindedness" - are just as essential. They imbue life with a cosmic significance and a sense of the sacred. It is hard to even put it in words, but every Catholic who goes to Traditional Latin Mass will know what I am saying.
Finally, this ecumenical idea that all Christian sects will come together as one under the banner of Love is naive to say the least. The reason the Catholic Church used to be so against religious liberty is because religion is a dangerous thing. Look at all the bad fruits Protestantism has produced -- mega-churches, prosperity Gospel, Christian Zionism, endless schism, looney cults like the Pentecostals. This is what the Inquisition was trying to prevent.
>Religion is symbolic at its core.
I always knew a number of tradcaths were crypto-atheists but this just proves it beyond all doubt
You completely misunderstood what Goethe is saying. When he says narrow-minded, he means being incapable of sympathising with a slightly different view to your own and burning people at the stake for heresy. When he says we will not attach as much importance to the outer manifestations of religion, he does not mean that those outer rituals and cultural fixtures must disappear or become ephemeral, he means these outer expressions as a force for separating one Christian from another will disappear.
Your last paragraph is the typical Tradcath excuses, so pathetically desperate to claim any victory, no matter how insignificant or contrived, for Catholicism in spite of all the manifold evils of the Church's history.
It's pointless. He'll just go over the same old Catholic talking points.
>well ackshually, in 1870 we proclaimed this doctrine called ex cathedra (it means from the chair), so as long as the pope doesn't specifically define a catholic doctrine ex cathedra, then it doesn't count. what he does otherwise is his own business xD
>uhh you know no one actually likes the pope, right? what? no i'm not a filthy sede.
>there have been bad popes before, what makes this pope so special?
>what do you mean the catholic church has produced bad fruits, too? LOOK AT THE PROTESTANTS!
>i don't know what you mean by Sabellianism, the council of Nicaea, Arianism, Pelagianism, semi-Pelagianism, the schism, the eastern roman empire, anti-Jesuitism, Gnosticism, Montanism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism, Monoenergism, Iconoclasm, Catharism Jansenism, Branch theory, Antidicomarians Aerius of Sebaste, Helvedius, Jovinianism, Gottschalk of Orbais, Waldensians, William of Ockham, Petrarch, or Miaphysitism, and I ESPECIALLY don't know anything about the Union of Brest, the De auxiliis controversy, and the Council of Basel
Thank Mr Melanchthon
> This is what the Inquisition was trying to prevent.
They certainly may have been sincerely trying to prevent this, for better or worse, but, looking at the historical record with a so-called ‘objective viewpoint’, I think you can go so far as to say that the Inquisitors nevertheless, bold a claim as this may be to make, again, objectively overstepped the bounds of morality. This stain alone is enough to get some people wondering that ‘maybe the specific entity called “the Vatican”, or “the Roman Catholic Church”, isn’t the sole, supreme, superior and unique entity in which all cosmic, universal, existential and personal truth is vested.’ I can’t help but feel that people who so still desperately hold onto such a (narrow, traditional, dogmatic, sectarian, pettty and prejudicial) worldview are somehow tragically brainwashed, yet not without perhaps having some strange archaic degree of nobility and old-fashioned goodness in them in hanging onto it, out of desperate search for a truly good, meaningful, worthy, and even divinely-inspired worldview.
Can you call Dostoyevsky entirely worthless in his writing and thoughts? For his adherence to Russian Orthodoxy and powerful biting critiques of the Vatican/what a force like the Roman Catholic Church represents in books like The Brothers Karamazov? Or Tolstoy, who became a powerful yet unconventional voice speaking for Christianity, again apart from Roman Catholicism?
Will you throw out Milton and Blake too? Goethe, as the topic of the thread is about? Emerson? Any major great figure you can imagine for ‘not being strictly a Roman Catholic’? It just seems off to me. I can even get something great from Sufis like Hafiz, Rumi, Shams-i Tabrizi, Hakim Sanai, Attar, and more (as Goethe at least partially did, incidentally, being a huge Arabo-weaboo for the poetry and philosophy of Hafiz in early translation).
I just can’t fathom it. At worst, at your worst possible interpretation of it, give me even the ‘Spinozism’ of Goethe (and the Spinozism Melville incidentally plausibly gives respect to and references in a passage in Moby Dick on Ishmael’s mystical musings). I wouldn’t be ashamed to have such illustrious compatriots in my worldview, and I honestly can’t take the Catholic Church seriously after learning a few things like the Christian-mob-inspired-slaughter-and-torture-of-Hypatia, the Albigensian Crusade which slaughtered Cathars, the Dominican Inquisition, Witch Hunts, and even the modern ‘pedophilia in the Catholic Church’ scandal. Sad, but (at least mostly) true.
Very based and reasonable. It's such a pain talking with Catholics who refuse to even accept the possibility of any other form of Christianity having some virtues.
Not all of us are so sectarian. I will say that all the virtues I've found in men outside the Church are to be found more purely and in a greater degree within it (pic related).
That protestants liked sufi mystics shouldn't be a surprise, I'm not christian at all but it always seemed to me that in terms of mentality and practices protestants resembled muslims or even israelites more than they did catholics. Their rejection of the veneration of saints or Mary, iconoclasm, belief in predestination, preference for mystical irrationality to anything else, and so on. If catholicism is the re-paganization of christianity then protestantism was the re-semitization of christianity.
>protestantism was the re-semitization of christianity
Very tenuous statement. Lutheranism was more like the unchaining of native German spirituality from a Latin domination. And we have Bach as a vital testament to that. Whatever you think of Christianity's origin, Christian spirituality is a current of European spirituality.
moronic thread
IQfy is still garbage and you morons should feel bad. And the morons responding to the other morons should also feel bad for wasting your time.
He's talking about spinozism. The entire protestant and romantic tradition is little else but footnotes to spinoza.
What he's saying is that too many denominations place an over emphasis on form and pagaentry, when all that is really important is obedience to Christ. And from that aspect, he's right. Both Catholics and Orthodox can feel very narrowminded and at times bigoted. Where protestants went wrong is they abandoned the Church fathers and original Christian theology.