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Updated: May 6, 2025
Thou art in CHRIST over hell, and all that it contains. 'Behmen's speculation, Martensen is always reminding us, 'streams forth from the deepest practical inspiration. His speculations are all saturated with a constant reference to salvation. His whole metaphysic is pervaded by practical applications. And conspicuously so, we may here point out, is his metaphysic of GOD and of the heart of man.
Martensen recalls the story of Jeanie Deans, in Scott's "Heart of Midlothian," who refuses to tell a lie of exigency in order to save her sister's life; yet who, having uttered the truth which led to her sister's sentence of death, set herself, in faith in God, to secure that sister's pardon, and by God's grace compassed it.
This would seem to be explicit enough to shut out the possibility of a justifiable lie! "Yet it does not follow from this," says Martensen, "that our duty to communicate the truth to others is unlimited.... 'There is a time to be silent, and a time to speak. No one is bound to say everything to everybody." Here he distinguishes between justifiable concealment and falsehood.
Bishop Martensen has a fine passage on the fragmentariness of our knowledge, not only of divine providence as a whole, but even of those divine providences that fill up our own lives. And he warns us that, till we have heard the "Prologue in Heaven," many a riddle in our lives must of necessity remain unsolved.
"The history of ascetics," says Martensen, "teaches us that by such overdone fasting the fancy is often excited to an amazing degree, and in its airy domain affords the very things that one thought to have buried, by means of mortification, a magical resurrection." In attempting to subdue the body, many necessary requirements of the physical organism were totally ignored.
And the two men are representative disputants in this controversy of the centuries, as truly as were Augustine and Chrysostom. A close friend of Dorner was Hans Lassen Martensen, "the greatest theologian of Denmark," and a thinker of the first class, "with high speculative endowments, and a considerable tincture of theosophical mysticism."
Martin, and Hegel, and Law, and Walton, and Martensen, and Hartmann have said about Jacob Behmen and his visions of GOD and Nature and Man were all but literally true.
But, just as incredible adversity could not crush Abraham Lincoln, so lavish prosperity could not keep down or spoil Theodore Roosevelt. In his "Autobiography" he tells us that "about 1644 his ancestor, Claes Martensen van Roosevelt, came to New Amsterdam as a 'settler' the euphemistic name for an immigrant who came over in the steerage of a sailing ship in the seventeenth century.
In conclusion, in view of all that can be said on either side of the question, Martensen is sure that "the lie of exigency itself, which we call inevitable, leaves in us the feeling of something unworthy, and this unworthiness should, simply in following Christ, more and more disappear from our life.
A few years before, it had been rumoured in Copenhagen after the publication of my little polemical pamphlet against Nielsen, that at a dinner at the Heiberg's there had been a good deal of talk about me; even Bishop Martensen had expressed himself favourably, and it also attracted attention that a short time afterwards, in a note to his book On Knowledge and Faith, he mentioned me not unapprovingly, and contented himself with a reminder to me not to feel myself too soon beyond being surprised.
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