One admires Christ
according to aesthetic categories as an aesthetic genius, calls him the
greatest ethicist; one admires his going to his death as a heroic sacrifice for
his ideas. Only one thing one doesn't
do: one doesn't take him seriously. That
is, one doesn't bring the center of his or her own life into contact with the
claim of Christ to speak the revelation of God and to be that revelation. One maintains
a distance between himself or herself and the word of Christ, and allows
no serious encounter to take place. I
can doubtless live with or without Jesus as a religious genius, as an ethicist,
as a gentleman - just as, after all, I can also live without Plato and
Kant….Should, however, there be something in Christ that claims my life
entirely with the full seriousness that here God himself speaks and if the word
of God once became present only in Christ, then Christ is not only relative but
absolute, urgent significance for me…understanding Christ means taking Christ
seriously. Understanding this claim
means taking seriously his absolute claim on our commitment. And it is now of importance for us to clarify
the seriousness of this matter and to extricate Christ from the secularization
process in which he has been incorporated since the Enlightenment.
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer
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