41.
—And from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself: “how
could God allow it!” To which the deranged reason of the
little community formulated an answer that was terrifying in its
absurdity: God gave his son as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of
sins. At once there was an end of the gospels! Sacrifice for sin, and in
its most obnoxious and barbarous form: sacrifice of the innocent for
the sins of the guilty! What appalling paganism !—Jesus himself had done
away with the very concept of “guilt,” he denied that there was
any gulf fixed between God and man; he lived this unity between
God and man, and that was precisely his ”glad tidings”.
. . And not as a mere privilege!—From this time forward the type
of the Saviour was corrupted, bit by bit, by the doctrine of judgment and
of the second coming, the doctrine of death as a sacrifice, the doctrine
of the resurrection, by means of which the entire concept of
“blessedness,” the whole and only reality of the gospels, is
juggled away—in favour of a state of existence after
death! . . . St. Paul, with that rabbinical impudence which shows itself in
all his doings, gave a logical quality to that conception, that indecent
conception, in this way: ”If Christ did not rise from the dead,
then all our faith is in vain!”—And at once there sprang from the
Gospels the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the shameless
doctrine of personal immortality. . . Paul even preached it as a reward . . .
