Article XIII: Of works before justification

1 Response

  1. Bob Chapman says:

    “Can something be a sin if done by one person, and that same act be holy when done by another?”

    One of the marks of mathematics as it matured was the ability to substitute variables for specific quantities. For example, the Egyptians knew a triangle with sides of 3 units, 4 units, and 5 units resulted in a triangle that you could use when surveying to create a right angle at the corner of a building. It was Pythagoras, a later Greek, that expressed this as the Pythagorean Theorem using variables to stand in for the specific length sides of the triangle.

    For the pondering point of Scott, I needed to remove the variables and introduce specific values. Otherwise, I have trouble with the question.

    If I intentionally kill another person, it is murder. If Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his co-conspirators had been successful in killing Hitler, would they have been murderers?