Every human being is by nature designated to become a thinker (all honor and praise to the God who created man in his image!). God is not to be faulted if habit and routine and lack of passion and affectation and chatter with neighbors right and left gradually corrupt most people, so that they become thoughtless — and their eternal happiness on one thing and another and a third something — and do not notice the secret that their talk about their eternal happiness is an affectation because it is devoid of passion, and there it might as well be built on matchstick arguments.

The reliability of the eighteen centuries, the fact that Christianity has permeated all relations of life, reshaped the world, etc., this reliability is just an illusion by which the resolving and choosing subject is trapped and he enters the perdition of parenthesis.

But let a person have passion enough to grasp the meaning of his own eternal happiness, and then let him try to tie it to his having been baptized — he will despair.

It is just too bad that where one should be objective, in strict scholarship, objectivity is rare, because a savant equipped with expert autopsy is a great rarity. In relation to Christianity, however, objectivity is an extremely unfortunate category, and the one who has objective Christianity and nothing else is eo ipso a pagan, because Christianity is precisely a matter of spirit and of inwardness.

Christianity is spirit; spirit is inwardness; inwardness is subjectivity; subjectivity is essentially passion, and at its maximum an infinite, personally interested passion for one’s eternal passion.

Thus everything is assumed to be in order with regard to the Holy Scriptures — what then? Has the person who did not believe come a single step closer to faith? No, not a single step.

One has become too objective to have an eternal happiness….

Anyone who as a believer posits inspiration must consistently regard every critical deliberation — whether for of against — as something dubious, a kind of temptation. And anyone who, without having faith, ventures out into critical deliberations cannot possibly want to have inspiration result from them. To whom, then, is it all really of interest?

But, in truth, because one makes charitable contributions, because he visits the widow and clothes the naked — his love is not necessarily demonstrated or made recognizable by such deeds, for one can perform works of love in an unloving, yes, even in a self-loving way, and when this is so, the works of love are nevertheless not the works of love.

For the divine authority of the Gospel speaks not to one man about another man, not to you, the reader, about me, or to me about you — no, when the gospel speaks it speaks to the single individual. It does not speak about us men, you and me, but it speaks to us men, you and me, and it speaks about the requirement that love shall be known by its fruits.