Saints are people who live...
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Object:
Saints are people who live by the Golden Rule. Sort of. Martin Luther claimed that anyone can obey the Golden Rule; it is just common sense:
For nature teaches -- as does love -- that I should do as I would be done by.
(Luke 6:31)
... that love and natural law may always prevail... Such a free decision is given, however, by love and by natural law with which all reason is filled.
(Luther's Works, Vol. 45, p. 128)
It is not just saints who do good. Anyone (even non-Christians) can be moral. So what makes a saint? Real saints, Luther says, are "good stout sinners... they are not called saints because they are without sins or have become saintly through works... But they become holy through a foreign holiness, namely though that of the Lord Christ..." (What Luther Says, p. 1247).
It really is, then, like 19th-century American journalist Ambrose Bierce once wrote: "Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited."
Robert Louis Stevenson tells us who we saints are: "The saints are sinners who keep on going."
For nature teaches -- as does love -- that I should do as I would be done by.
(Luke 6:31)
... that love and natural law may always prevail... Such a free decision is given, however, by love and by natural law with which all reason is filled.
(Luther's Works, Vol. 45, p. 128)
It is not just saints who do good. Anyone (even non-Christians) can be moral. So what makes a saint? Real saints, Luther says, are "good stout sinners... they are not called saints because they are without sins or have become saintly through works... But they become holy through a foreign holiness, namely though that of the Lord Christ..." (What Luther Says, p. 1247).
It really is, then, like 19th-century American journalist Ambrose Bierce once wrote: "Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited."
Robert Louis Stevenson tells us who we saints are: "The saints are sinners who keep on going."
