logos redux

We see that for Luther commandment ethics and worship ethics are actually intertwined. His commandment ethics is an ethics anchored in worship, not a pure commandment ethics. It is only in modern purism that we find for thenorm ethics is not simply that it is a secularized first time a pure commandment ethics, in the notion that there can be such thins as morel principles, norms, and values which exist independently, simply on their own, as postualtes of ‘pure reason’. Thus the problem of modern commandment ethics; what is questionable is not merely the abstraction through which the enjoining power is moved from a personal God to the rule of a law of reason or–later–mere convention. The questionable thing is already the detachment from the liturgical, life-forming context in which commandment ethics in its Jewish and Christian sense was, and is, embedded, and which even a secularized commandment ethics is not able to dispense with. Consequently, talk about norms remains blind to its own conditioning matrix. For what makes norms be norms is never simply ‘pure reason’, ‘mere convention’, or the like, but has its seat in the depths of the self-reflection of a society and its own images of itself. Norms are the moral side of the idols a society worships, just as commandments illuminate in the light of love the face of God turned towards the worshipping congregation.

Bernd Wannenwetsch in Political Worship, Ch 4, pg 61

This book really is amazing. Unfortunately it costs around $200 and my copy is due back at the library about a week ago. It’s a dense read, but I’m going to go through it again this semester as part of an independent study that was largely inspired by my first reading of it.