Stroke doziness

Just a note as my state of dozy daze gradually diminishes.  As yet I have no news about the MRI and my heart 24 hour monitor is not until November 22nd. but I am feeling more positive.  And interest in the world around is actively creeping in.  In particular, the 500th. anniversary of the Reformation has given me a push to dip into Martin Luther's sermons - vigorous, blunt, creative and courageous. You can still feel their impact.  He was always concerned to preach in plain language.

When I preach I sink myself deeply down....I have an eye for the multitude of young people, children and servants, of which there are more than two thousand. I preach to them.  

At the same time he was deeply concerned about the authority of Scripture and interpreting it in its' literal, ordinary, natural sense.'  Woe betide anyone who complicated the process of interpretation. This week I also read his vituperative pamphlet against Jerome Emser who taught that Scripture had a literal sense and a spiritual sense - a secret often allegorical understanding.  Emser followed ideas of Origen, Jerome, Dionysius and others.  No, no, no! writes Luther.  His pamphlet is titled: Answer to the Superchristian, Superspiritual and Superlearned Book of Goat Emser of Leipzig.  You really get a feel of the reformer at full flow in his desire to exalt the authority of Scripture over tradition!.

Actually, later he himself was to see a deeper spiritual dimension to texts but he insisted that an meaning deeper than the ordinary must be signaled by Scripture itself. 

So a little reading has connected me this week with this extraordinary figure of Reformation history and in spite of my post stroke state I have been able to celebrate.