The Meaning of “The Fruit of the Lips” in the Work of Rosenstock-Huessy – Otto Kroesen

In this text, I outline the main points of “The Fruit of the Lips” and situate this small work by Rosenstock of only one hundred pages within the context of Rosenstock-Huessy’s work as a whole. For a proper understanding, one should read the whole text oneself. However, a brief summary can also serve as a reading guide. Moreover, it serves as an introduction to my own reflections on the contemporary interpretation of the Gospels and salvation history.

Rosenstock-Huessy’s vision is based on the fact that Christ is the center of world history. He is the turning point from a way of life in which the ultimate focus is on self-affirmation and the continuity of what is one’s own, to a way of life that prioritizes the appeal of the Other and an existence as a response to it. This does not mean that there is no longer any struggle and self-affirmation after Christ. But it has lost its justification and legitimacy, and with it, its self-evidence. Expressed in the language of Rosenstock-Huessy: our soul is already on the other side, on the side of completion. We know that it must go in that direction. Our heart knows that. The ‘I’ that I am has thereby lost its inner center; it finds its justification as an ego only in bearing responsibility, as in the expression “Here I am!” The word ‘I’ is also said to originate from the French “ici,” or at least share the same etymology, as in “me voici.” The rock-solid ‘I’ thus ceases to be a self-involved ego but becomes a node and a crossroads: a claim is directed at “me,” and I answer as a voice among multiple voices.

The story of this transformation is given in the four Gospels. These are not some sort of theory, as Rosenstock-Huessy wishes to emphasize by calling the Gospels “The Fruit of the Lips.” Below, I summarize a number of important themes from that book as background to my own studies in the Gospels. The text I am following is taken from the English version of the book “The Fruit of Our Lips,” based on the text established by Raymond Huessy, that is to say, the text dating from 1954 which was later expanded on the occasion of various publications – see Rosenstock-Huessy, E., 2021. The Fruit of Our Lips – The Transformation of God’s Word into the Speech of Mankind, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Ed. Raymond Huessy Wipf & Stock, Eugene, Oregon. The numbers that appear occasionally in the text below refer to the pages in this book.

From self-affirmation to the priority of the Appeal: after the Second World War, it was primarily the philosopher Levinas who articulated this shift. However, precisely because of the Second World War, Levinas does not wish to rely on history as a teacher. That trust has been shaken by the course of history. Implicitly, of course, this does happen: his thinking, too, has been shaped, precisely by the crisis of the Second World War and the murder of 6 million Jews. Rosenstock-Huessy is more of a historian, and real events always involve a new language and way of experiencing. The shift that Levinas articulates philosophically took place for Rosenstock-Huessy 2,000 years ago, on Golgotha.

There all forms of self-affirmation come to an end. It should be borne in mind that in ancient times self-affirmation meant the same as participation in one of the four mutually exclusive cultural streams of antiquity. The tribe is humanity’s first form of society. The tribe lives from the past on the authority of the ancestors. The imperial culture must be distinguished from the tribe, because a central authority now rules over a larger area, such as in Egypt, Babylon and Rome. Israel, on the other hand, does not live from the past like the tribe, and not in an eternal cyclical present like the Empire, but lives from the future: justice is yet to come. Greek theater and Greek theory live in an eternal interior space of stories, beauty and wonder. Actually, these four tradition streams live in their own “worlds”. They cannot understand each other, only reject each other. How could this become possible if self-affirmation and continuation of the chosen course is the prevailing norm? I know that many people will be annoyed that Israel’s contribution is also classified here under the heading “self-affirmation”, but at that time the law of Moses with its 613 commandments became an impregnable fence around Israel. This also made it impossible for Israel to attribute a salvation-historical significance to the other three cultural streams.

In the Roman Empire, the four streams of tradition as mentioned lived together, but were spiritually separated from each other. One cannot belong with conviction to both the tribe and the empire. One could only make external compromises with other traditions, so that people ended up living in different worlds. Only the substitution in the sense of being-for-the-other, love, Agape, in which one cares for others, could bring about change here. That is what Jesus Christ accomplished.

1. What does the Christian age consist of?

What is the meaning of the Christian era? According to many, there is no Christian era at all. And if it ever was there, it’s over now. We either live in the moment, that is, only in our own time, or we claim eternity. That is true even in theology. The succession of historical epochs is then merely arbitrary. However, the translation of the word aionios as eternal, that is, “forever,” is clearly incorrect. Aionios means age. The “eternal” punishment in hell (aionios) is also temporary, according to Rosenstock-Huessy.

It is impossible for a human being to subsist solely on the latest news. How can you overcome the random sequence of times? How can I connect with times before me and times after me? The question is even more existential: how to escape the destruction that my own era is heading for? There is a raft, like Rosenstock-Huessy says, that carries us through the abysses of the stream of time. Paganism is: being absorbed in your own time. The Christian era connects the time before me and the time after me with my time. The Gospels are like stones in the water so that I can jump from stone to stone to the other side and enter a new era. They are so many stations in the incarnation of the Christian age. The events of the Gospel give us the voice necessary to bear fruit further and again.

The four cultural forms of antiquity are united and overcome in their one-sidedness in Jesus. Those four cultural streams are the tribe – which lives from the ancestors, the past; the national culture – which lives in a cyclical rhythm of time, the agricultural calendar; Israel – Israel is betting all its cards on the future of the coming justice; Greece – theory and theater take a contemplative stance. These four one-sided approaches are brought together by Jesus. Therefore he is the Christ. Christ is the fruit of the lips of old times.

He took upon himself the sins of old. This means that the ritual of the tribes, the temples of the heaven-oriented kingdoms, the poetry that sings the praises of nature, the Messianic psalms, no longer end in isolation from each other. Isolated from each other they become dead ends, brought together in Christ they are renewed by finding the right mutual rhythm and now they can experience the achievements of the other as a contribution to salvation.

He had their wealth in his hands, heart and soul. But with all that wealth, antiquity was at a dead end. His real life always went beyond his social role. Isolated in the four cultural forms of antiquity, it was not possible to step outside your role within any of those cultural forms. He went beyond them. This excess is a good definition of “man” in the Christian era. He was:

Child of the ancestors of the tribes.

Child of the times of the heavenly kingdoms.

Child of nature in Greece.

Child of the revolution in Israel.

To properly understand these four cultural flows, one must read the Soziologie of Rosenstock-Huessy. In this work he describes the history of these four cultural flows up to Christ as well as their interconnected process of change in Western history after Christ. All four cultural streams have founded a new language, produced a new type of human being, and acquired new human character traits. Because these four cultural streams learn to exist “for the other” through Christ, they can open up to each other and support each other instead of excluding each other. This is not an easy process of change, because leaving established legal orders and achievements behind is a necessary step in the process for common salvation. This can only be achieved through a difficult process of trial and error. It is the process of man’s creation. Because this process is connected to language, Rosenstock-Huessy included this text about the fruit of the lips at the end of his language philosophy “Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts”. This text, better, Jesus Christ himself, is the cornerstone and capstone of his vision.

The 19th century focused on the life of Jesus while abandoning these connections. Biographies came into fashion at that time. This is the opposite of the Christian tradition, insofar as it locks people up in their own time. On the other hand, we no longer speak the languages ​​and jargon of Greeks, Egyptians, tribes and Jews. We see through that. It’s just a part of us. That is already thanks to the workings of the Christian era. Once a person discovers love, he also discovers the time continuum of love. Love can take different forms at different times. By love man can understand the secrets of flowers and stars, of his own identity, and the belief that all creatures are ultimately understandable to each other.

2. The heart and the lips

The coming of Jesus Christ 2000 years ago in Palestine is not an isolated event. The whole history of the human race has participated in it. We as humans are the fruit of the lips of previous generations and our lips will in turn bear fruit in the next generation. The entire human race participated in producing this man, Jesus Christ, insofar as they had spoken with fruit, with consequences, with commitment, with continuity. The cross blocks the way back to the four cultural streams of antiquity in their isolation. Polyphony has come about and a process of translating from one voice into another has started.

We have no direct access to the lips of Jesus. The Gospels are the lips of Jesus. They give voice and meaning to his death. We are expected to be the fruit of these lips. The Gospels can only be the lips of the Word at the crucifixion if they have all the might and powers of pre-Christian language and at the same time go a step further beyond anything that has ever been said before. That’s how we should read them.

This is undone if the Gospels are made into mere source material, whereby three are reduced to each other or reduced to a Q source and at the same time the fourth Gospel is sidelined by moving it to the second century. “We shall never know an “historical” Jesus behind so-called “material”” (202). In so-called scientific research there is a great need to contradict existing views. One always has to come up with something new. However, contradiction alone does not lead to a positive result. One can reject that John, for example, was written by John, but the rejected statement cannot be replaced by a better one through mere speculation. That is what has happened in Biblical criticism. If our tradition is wrong, we simply have a wrong tradition and that cannot be turned into a positive story.

Every era has its own Zeitgeist. How can one bring these different spirits of the times together? Jesus did this by the power of the Holy Spirit. Paul applied that new power of the Holy Spirit in a colossal way. The Holy Spirit shows the spirits of the times as only branches of the Spirit, which must be brought to greater wholeness. In that sense, thinking is not free. Although one can think and criticize freely and believe in the natural mind of man, one can only do so if peace has already been established together with the institutions that make that peace possible. This means that the thinking critic must maintain the unity and continuity of speech across the ages among all human groups, and cannot place himself outside this flow of language. Science cannot exist without peace. – In other words: one is first the fruit of lips and must first bear fruit in the next generation, before anything like freedom of thought is possible at all. Chaos and war threaten if this continuity of convinced peacemaking is interrupted. Two world wars have thrown us back into a pre-Christian and pre-Homeric and pre-Mosaic world. Language is a continuum.

3. The language of the Gospels

The evangelists have stated that something happened to the continuum of language in their time. Their writing reflects this change. It is therefore important to indicate where the then way of writing changed, so to speak, chemically in composition due to their input. “Only when the intellect is able to identify the process by which it arrives at truth as the process that proceeds in the four Gospels, will the mind return on its accusation that Christianity is as dead as a dodo and was never anything but a salubrious or opprobrious myth” (208).

In ancient times, a particular school or book was closed to others. Different truths are inaccessible to each other. They only know their own right. The Gospels, on the other hand, respond to each other. There is ever greater boldness. Johannes must have been just as “boyishly cheerful” as his master. But Matthew speaks with dignity, seriousness and caution. Mark speaks under the authority of Peter and Luke is freer again. John is the most bold.

For John, Jerusalem is part of the world in darkness. Jerusalem had been wiped off the map when he wrote, according to Rosenstock-Huessy. He does live in a new emerging world. Matthew, on the other hand, had to fight. He could hardly hope to live in peace in Jerusalem after writing his Gospel.

When Matthew wrote there was no new testament yet. Through his gospel he turned the Bible of his day into an Old Testament. This was an observable fact for his readers. Matthew himself only became aware of this after writing his gospel. Matthew starts as a Jew and ends as a non-Jew. Matthew begins with Israel and with Jesus as the Son of David. At the end, his own eloquence takes him away from the Jewish world. Because of the words at the end of Matthew that Jesus will remain with them until the end of the world, Jesus’ short life suddenly gains a momentum that far exceeds Jesus’ short life on earth. This one sentence dares to speak of the future as separate from the Jewish Bible.

Peter prevented a venerable treatment of Peter in Mark’s Gospel by showing him in his weakness and failure.

In Luke, Christ is divided into two periods. Finally, where Paul is, in Rome, there is now also the temple, to Luke’s own surprise. To describe the end of Paul at the end of Acts would have negated the recognition of the Holy Spirit as “Christ once more.” It would have given too much weight to Paul’s own life.

A Christian in the first century was introduced to a new way of life, to the way, and such a person was taught the things necessary to become a missionary himself, on the way to a witness, a guide, perhaps a martyr. It is a wonderful fact that something written as gospel was allowed at all.

4. Ink and blood

It was not self-evident that anything was written down at all. After all, believing Jesus Christ was in contrast to the written word, the rigid letter of the law. Things go wrong with writing. That ends with dead letters. It was only under the impact of the stoning of Stephen that Matthew may have dared to write. “We must speak and write and think and teach and testify only when we and our mind would disintegrate if we did not. We speak lest we go mad. It all amounts to the rule that a new style will not be created except under supreme pressure” (214).

Luke, with his important expression “the ministers of the word,” made himself the minister of the Spirit of two periods. The Holy Spirit is holy because he has power over different fashion styles in different times. Every generation has its own genius. The servants of the Word are therefore servants of the word translated again and again. Without this translation the spirits of the different times become demons. How to continue from genius to genius and yet in one Spirit is also our question.

This sheds light on the step that Mark’s gospel then takes. Peter was in charge of the sheep. As such, it would not do for him to become too much of an equal to Jesus. That is why he ensures that in Mark the uniqueness of the “Son of God” is established forever. That’s why he makes Mark take him, Peter, down. The apostles all come off badly in Mark, but Peter most of all. Luke, in turn, ensured that in the story of the two disciples to whom the risen Christ appeared on the road to Emmaus, Peter’s name was withheld, while Paul later stated outright that Peter was the first to see the risen Christ.

John was a kindred spirit with Jesus: “Natural congeniality, creature-like affinity was John’s special source of knowledge; similar sources of enhanced understanding were Peter’s office in the church, Matthew’s experience of being saved, Luke’s responsibility to the next generation” (219). A kindred spirit understands through sympathy and “congeniality” in its true meaning, where Jesus comes from, from what deep necessity, from what original matrix. John sympathized with Jesus inwardly in his own soul. His victory consists in seeing in the small events of everyday life the cosmic meaning of Christ in Jesus.

5. Ichthys

Johannes, even though he was a kindred spirit who immediately came to insight, had to learn to recognize that it was equally necessary to be faithfully obedient to the division of labor in the visible world, in which progress is always very slow. All evangelists have had to experience such a change. Matthew begins by establishing that Jesus was the King of the Jews, but at the end he has to recognize that, for God’s sake, he is no longer a Jew. Mark kneels before Peter but ultimately has to admit that he cannot rely on Peter, nor can any other person who professes his faith. This gave him a lesson about the unity of the church, for it can only be one if only one gives it its name. The change that takes place with Luke is that the original drama of Jesus now becomes the matrix from which all believers emerge.

The name Ichthys “Jesus, Christ, Son of God, Savior”, in reverse order, reflects the meaning of each Gospel: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. The law of historical development means that what is most important in an event only is articulated by the last word. That he saves sinners is the first thing that happens in Matthew. The closest contact with him as with the person of Jesus was the last, for John. John reflects Jesus’ innermost thoughts.

Jesus interpreted the signs of the times a generation earlier than the year 70. He lived during a break in time. Matthew’s genealogy and Stephen’s speech in Acts both point to that break in time that comes with Jesus. How could Jesus know that the Roman Empire was over? He sensed it. The Roman Empire fell when the Spirit that animated it left it. That is a general law, when people no longer believe in their own cause: Then kingdoms fall.

The Greek mind always moved through contradictions. People always looked for the opposite. That changes with the Gospels. Now it is “Yes maybe, but certainly in a different way”. This new method becomes possible because the heart and soul of the different thinkers had already become one before the discussion started. “Of this Stephen, Matthew, Luke, have given the first perfect example of which I know” (225). The beginning of the Christian era occurred through the common efforts of Stephen, Matthew and Luke.

6. The end gives birth to the beginning

The Gospels give birth to each other (226). They take over from each other:

Matthew begins with “Son of David” and ends with “Son of God”

Mark begins with “Son of God” and ends with “Servants of the Word” (Mark 16:15)

Luke begins with the ministers of the Word, and ends in Acts with: the Jews have no ears and eyes, but the Gentiles will hear.

John records the latter: the world, the darkness, has not accepted him, but he has shown his glory to his followers.

Luke’s gospel also ends with the power of the gospel and John begins with it.

7. The Idols: Art, Religion, Science, Good Manners

Behind the numbers and concepts, Matthew discovers the power of the word of somebody on the way to his death.

Peter, the peasant fisherman, comes to Rome with its temple astrology and proclaims the true temple, the word, with the hieroglyphs of that temple, the servants of the Word.

Luke, the Greek physician who knows about the art of healing, has to do with the “no” of the Jews against the physical world with their fear of contamination by idols, and places that “no” between the natural law of Jews and pagans on the one hand and the creative yes of the Christians. Anyone who experiences no in suffering and death gives shape to yes without self-affirmation.

John, the prophet of revelation comes into the Greek cosmos and sets their art and poetry free by making God’s poetry his theme. God writes his poem.

John was sent into the Greek world. Luke was sent into the Jewish spiritual world. Peter was sent into the Roman star world, Mark even to Egypt. Matthew, the ill-mannered one, discovered the price of all ritual. John shows the inner poetry of every person who writes or speaks. That is the word that becomes flesh, because that is also the driving force behind all poetry. He could do that because as a Jew he was immune to too much poetry.

As a Greek physician, Luke was immune to too much prophecy, the Jewish denial of success in the world. As a doctor, Lucas knows the healing power of a little poison. The Holy One of God comes into the veins of society and he may perish there, like Jesus, but he will heal and restore society. Jesus institutionalized this process by which people sacrifice themselves for their enemies, for a society that reacts violently against them.

The Greek world could easily deify a man. Israel’s mission is to counteract that. How can the Jews be convinced that the delicate dividing line between man and creator, heaven and earth, is not destroyed by faith in the incarnation of God’s Son? This was only possible if, as a human being, we first give space to God’s no through the willingness to suffer. Only in Luke is the cross-examination of Jesus designed in such a way that Jesus himself never says “I am the Messiah”. This is the case with Marcus. In this way, by accepting failure and defeat, as Luke’s Christ does, Christianity builds into itself the truth of the Old Testament. The hated bringer of the good news is punished by the recipients. This purifies the will of the messenger from too much self-affirmation. That changes the persecutors.

John, the Hebrew prophet, is able to redeem Greek poetry. Luke, a Greek doctor can make Israel’s stubborn denials fruitful again.

A similar exchange occurs between Mark and Matthew and their audience.

The Gospel of Mark was written against the Son of the gods as the center of the universe on whom harmony and prosperity depend. In Mark’s eschatological speech, the image of the emperor, “the abomination of desolation,” stands in the holy of holies in the temple. This is also stated in Matthew, but in Mark this eschatological speech receives more emphasis, especially because it is the only speech he handed down. This speech describes how the sun is darkened and the moon no longer gives its light and the stars fall from heaven. These are the threats that the Pharaoh’s spells, the hieroglyphs on the temple, had banished. The cure for these star powers is discipleship: people as living building blocks were to take the place of the dead stars in the sky. Jesus had to take the place of the sun. On the side of the disciples there is misunderstanding on the one hand and expectation on the other. They don’t understand. In Gethsemane they sleep.

At the end of Mark it says that the apostles preached everywhere and that the Lord worked with them and confirmed their words by the signs that followed them (Mark 16: 15 – 20). This means that the Christian preachers replaced the magic of the star empires such as Rome or Egypt with a risky belief in the effect of a word spoken from the depths of the heart because it would call out all the good spirits in the hearers in an unforeseeable way. The pagans of all people tried to believe that the world has no heart. Mentioning the names of saints puts an end to chaos and panic. The Catholic Church did not sweep away the sorcery and magic of the temples by ignoring them but by replacing astrology with faith in a spirit of community in discipleship.

Jesus became the heart of a living universe through his faith in a freely given answer. The star powers are over, but on the night when Jesus left the people, the people themselves could become bright stars in anticipation of a full and brighter day. The second letter of Peter, 2: 19 refers to this: the Morning Star rising in our hearts. The Morning Star is no longer Sirius, the brightest star in the southern hemisphere, which in a certain position heralded the rising of the Nile in Egypt. The Morning Star that gives life is the love and community that rises in our hearts. Thus the ministers of the Word became the hieroglyphs of a new temple.

By voluntarily becoming a victim, Jesus became the first victim in the world to speak. So Matthew suggests. Victims, sacrifices, that is the core of the ritual, for they alone grant embodiment to the group and give the group a legitimate status as a public body beyond the grave, beyond birth and death. However, it is bad taste when the victim, the roast beef, starts speaking. And that is exactly what happens according to Matthew. He must have heard that word – bad taste – often spoken to him. The fact that Jesus spoke as a victim makes him impossible. In Jesus the bread and wine begin to speak in the middle of dinner. That shows bad taste. Drinking blood made the Jews furious. But it is precisely on this tastelessness that the church is based. Matthew knew that it was less good taste to speak as a victim, as our bread and wine, than to condemn the righteous. He was immune to the disease of good taste and good company.

Once upon a time, table manners had been the birthplace of political order. From the moment people do not take food away from each other, through the introduction of communal meals, a new peace is created. This also introduced hospitality and even the right of the enemy to eat with us. Because one becomes part of a succession through all time.

John spoke to the nations who were familiar with the arts and sciences.

Luke was speaking to the greatest Puritans of antiquity.

Mark was speaking to the civilized citizens of the temple state.

But Matthew went back to the most archaic layer of all society, the tribal layer of ritual.

Hence, Matthew gave a version of the Gospel that included the ritual that became the most universal and fundamental feature of the new way of life, the Eucharist. In the Mass, each member is invited to be willing to be sacrificed for the redemption and renewal of the world. The participants themselves are the sacrifice. The expression Body of Christ with the head in Heaven means exactly this: we, together with our head, step over to the side of the silent victims.

The dead ends of ritual, temple cult, Israel and Greece opened up to each other. These four people, the evangelists, were able to accomplish this because they were immune to the specific speech disease that their message conquered.

8. The Cross of Grammar

A word can be so true that it prompts the next speaker to continue speaking. “The Gospels were true enough to compel the next speaker to go on speaking above and beyond the last word of the last speaker” (247).

Matthew is thrown into a new era, the church.

Mark is under Peter’s command, but he has the roof of the community over him.

Lucas tells. He mediates to the next generation.

John stands at the source of an eternal beginning. He blocks the way back, a relapse into ritual, into imperial culture, or poetry or Jewish denial. Through John the cross, in which these four streams of speech come together in order to begin something new, becomes open to the future. For the word at the beginning points beyond all temporary forms.

The evangelists changed the cross of grammar into the grammar of the cross. One man has lived through all four forms of grammar: from imperative to “it is finished.”

Matthew was under the imperative: follow me, a sudden order.

Mark wrote for and with the prince of the apostles and was in the community of the twelve apostles, with a strongly lyrical tone.

Luke was part of Paul’s entourage and tells from Christmas onwards, like a narrator who did not experience it all himself.

To John the indicativus abstractus is: in the beginning was the word. John turns the private experience of Israel and the church into the general experience of all humanity.

This was the grammar of the cross. And now, after all the searching and groping through the ages, the epochs of all group life become transparent, like the cross of grammar. A human being needs to be initiated into this cross of grammar and if that does not happen, speaking has no purpose.

The Gnostics separated the life of a writer and teacher or apostle from the content of what he says. Gnostics do not enter the realm of experience in which man himself becomes the fruit of the lips and in turn the heart of someone else’s lips.

That is why it is important to make this cross of grammar visible in the symbols of the imagination of our own society. The Gospels are, as it were, the wax figures of four mental attitudes. Our body postures express our mental attitudes.

Matthew standing and fighting

John lying down as a visionary

Mark bending his knee next to Peter

Lucas sitting at his desk

The more traditional symbols for the Gospels no longer appeal to our generation: angel, lion, bull, eagle.

To stand means to be under order, in action.

Kneeling means receiving faith and peace through a community around one

Sitting means giving and telling instructions.

To lie down means to be receptive like an artist, genius.

9. The four apostles

The Gospels have created a new type of human being, a new race of human beings. Something like this can already be seen in the four evangelists themselves.

John is the only one who experienced the fall of ancient Israel and he could/had to write very differently from his predecessors.

James, the brother of John, should not be underestimated. One can surmise that he had authority on the Gospel of Matthew. This one wrote under his eyes. The beginning of the Christian era is proclaimed in Matthew 25:30-45. It is the time for the underdog to emerge and be placed above kings, emperors and priests. Matthew placed this part between the life of Jesus and the suffering. It must be understood that it was written under the eyes and with the consent of the first successor of Jesus at a time when the Jews were still the first recipients of the gospel. Its message is: Do not count in kings and priests, but measure the time in tears dried, pains lightened, and abuses taken away. It is not surprising that this new constitution was unacceptable, that John lost his life, that Matthew lost his people.

The remarkable departure from all that is Jewish in Mark is the result of the slow emancipation of Peter himself.

Paul had to deal with the pluralism and esotericism of personal piety. Just as Peter had to be turned around, so too did Paul: he had to rediscover his Greek education now that he had discovered the new law of freedom based on the voluntary sacrifice of one’s own will. After all, the first thing he did was go from Tarshish to Jerusalem and that was precisely what was not allowed. In this way the Trinitarian way of the one God through Christ in the Spirit could replace the “hear Israel”.

Jesus, Peter and Paul – This refers to the three languages ​​of the inscription of the cross: Hebrew, Latin, Greek. Luke undertakes the Herculean work of Paul’s struggle to translate the full purity of Jewish monotheism into the Trinitarian open road into the world.

John, brother of James, friend of his master, and co-worker of Peter, inherits all this in his gospel. The era that was secretly initiated by the Son of Man with the fall of the temple is brought into the open by John. Now the gospel stands on its own, independent of the Jewish background. In this way he brings to mind the incarnation as the new era and is open to the event of God’s coming.

10. The law of freedom

“If “the four Gospels” were His lips, the lips formed by Matthew going forward, motivating Mark to move into the inner sanctuary, Mark motivating Luke to look up the records from the past, Luke motivating John into the eternal cosmic seat place of truth” (259). “They reformed the cross of the grammar, of which these pages had to speak so often, by forming a grammar of the cross, in which mortal men united may conceive of being yet in process of being created, of being in the crucible today (259).”

“Having demonstrated that he could heal, rule, teach, sing, he dismissed all this as not good enough” (268). In doing so he made himself a new beginning.

“He interposed his whole life from beginning to end, and not just his last day, between the past and our era” (269).

“ The present-day crisis, then, is between the deep longing of all of us to drop the denominations and the high necessity to confess the scandal and the ridicule of the Cross” (270).

“He who lives under the cross knows that he is not excused by all his rational, social, natural, physical propensities. He knows that of course man is a coward, man is patterned and conditioned. But after Christ, he also knows that this is one half of the ledger only” (270).

“Not one of his actions could be as well understood by his contemporaries as by us, who see all the implications (271).”

“Jesus showed that all the words spoken before him had challenged him, ordered him into existence in as far as they were real prayer, real longing, real prophecy, fruitful imagination. And so he fulfilled them all (273).” The four Gospels follow each other and thus tell the whole truth. It is a poem spread over four decades.