Talking about Ethics is problematical in the Church today... In fact, a significant treatment on this topic, namely, _You Lost Me_ was a vyrso freebie about a month ago. Too many people hear our Christianity as just an out of date ethical system, and when they feel like they cannot relate to that system, just drift away.
In my personal opinion, for what little that is worth, it is simply because our Ethics has not been clearly Christian. The old saying was Doctrine Divides, but Service unites. Now we see that we aren't that united in Service either.
This is hardly a new problem. It was, in fact a major problem in the Reformation era. To pick a controversial point, the issues between Luther and the Peasant revolt in the sixteenth century. The Lutheran fathers, as good Augustinians argued that it was only though trusting the promise of Christ that we are able to do truly good works - works done with no self-interest, but simply because it needs to be done. As Sartorius argues, our dogmatics should be connected with our ethics.
This is the major text of Sartorius that has been translated into English. As expected from the title, it is quite influenced by Augustine, as well as being a fairly traditional Lutheran. As a 19th century scholar, he is not afraid to offer extended quotes in Latin, especially in the footnotes. He usually references the Lutheran Confessions in the Latin. I have tried to link it to the BookOfConcord datatype based on my limited Latin abilities. He also references quite a bit of Augustine. I have attempted links to De Trinitate and City of God, but do not have these texts in Logos, so cannot say if they actually point to the right sections.
As far as his importance today - well, again, I had not heard of him before the Jacobs book. But this theme of Divine Love that creates a new reality in Jesus is certainly not one that has gone away. And while the term "neology" is hardly in vogue today, that voice is certainly out there in the culture, in spite of a few world wars that should have at least tempered it.
Sartorius himself was quite up on the 19th century debates about the nature of "sacrifice" in the bible, even as he claimed that the old dogmatic views still had much to say about it... This is admittedly difficult to manage, but still needed.
As a side note, this is earliest work I have worked on that seemed aware of Communism. The Communist Manifesto was actually connected with the 1848 disturbances in Germany. By no means is this a major theme in this work nor does it offer penetrating view of it, but it is there.
SDG
Ken McGuire
