Michael von Faulhaber: Testament

“The God of the New Testament is not a different God from the God of the Old”

Michael von Faulhaber

Sermon 1
Context: In the Gospel of the New Testament the ancient conception of God is perfected and fulfilled... The same God who spoke from the bush on Mount Horeb had now appeared visibly in the Person of Emmanuel, God with us... The God of the New Testament is not a different God from the God of the Old.

God

“Let us venerate the Scriptures of the Old Testament”

Michael von Faulhaber

Sermon 1
Context: Let us venerate the Scriptures of the Old Testament... By accepting these books Christianity does not become a Jewish religion. These books were not composed by Jews; they are inspired by the Holy Ghost, and therefore they are the word of God, they are God's books. [-] Antagonism to the Jews of today must not be extended to the books of pre-Christian Judaism.

“If we are to repudiate the Old Testament and banish it from our schools and from our national libraries, then we must disown our German classics.”

Michael von Faulhaber

Sermon 1
Context: The German classics honoured the Scriptures of the Old Testament... If we are to repudiate the Old Testament and banish it from our schools and from our national libraries, then we must disown our German classics. We must cancel many phrases from the German language... We must disown the intellectual history of our nation.

School

“…the most serious charges are made nowadays, not against the religious values of the Old Testament, but against its ethical values…. the Sacred Scriptures of the Old Testament, which all Christians, of whatever denomination, treat with reverence, are spoken of in blasphemous terms which may not be repeated in this holy place.”

Michael von Faulhaber

Sermon Two

“So everyone, through Christ and with Him and in Him, must fulfil the Old Testament in himself. Only then have we passed from the kingdom of the shadows of the Old Testament into the kingdom of the light of the Gospel, from the letter of the service of God to the spirit of Divine sonship, from Judaism to Christianity…”

Michael von Faulhaber

Sermon 1

God , Light , Christ

“In recent years the fourth commandment has been stigmatized as un-German because it proposes a reward for its observance… on November I3th, 1933, the German Christians passed the following resolution : We expect our national Churches to shake themselves free of all that is un-German, in particular of the Old Testament and its Jewish morality of rewards… But it is not true to say that the fourth commandment teaches children a mercenary attitude with regard to God, that it encourages and consecrates an un-German spirit of self-seeking.”

Michael von Faulhaber

Sermon Two

God , Children