The spirit knows the
right way, an desires to follow it, but the flesh lacks courage and finds it
too hard, too hazardous and wearisome, and so it stifles the voice of the
spirit. The spirit assents when Jesus
bids us love our enemies, but flesh and blood are too strong and prevent our
carrying it out. Therefore we have to
practice strictest daily discipline only so can the flesh learn the painful
lesson that it has no rights of its own…The flesh resists this daily
humiliation, first by a frontal attack, and later by hiding itself under the
words of the spirit (i.e. in the name of "evangelical liberty"). We claim liberty from all legal compulsion,
from self- martyrdom and mortification,
and play this off against the proper evangelical use of discipline and
asceticism……Any objection that asceticism is wrong, and that all we need is
faith , is quite beside the point; it is cruel to suggest such a thing, and it
is no help to us at all. When all is
said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the
spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer
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