A difficulty about the New Testament
In the New Testament everything is planned in noble proportions.
The true is represented ideally; but on the other hand errors and aberrations are again on a big scale: we are warned against hypocrisy, against all sorts of false teaching, against presumptuous reliance upon good works, etc., etc.
But strangely enough the New Testament takes no account of the thing there is all-too-great a mass of in this world, which is the content of this world, that is, of twaddle, twattle, patter, smallness, mediocrity, playing at Christianity, transforming everything into mere words. Owing to this it is almost impossible by the aid of the New Testament to punch a blow at real life, at the actual world in which we live, where for one certified hypocrite there are 100,000 twaddlers, for one certified heretic, 100,000 nincompoops.
The New Testament seems to entertain high notions of what it is to be a man. On the one hand it holds up the ideal; on the other hand, when it depicts wrong actions, one sees that it has nevertheless a high notion of what it is to be a man: but twaddling, nincompoopism, mediocrity, are constantly spared its blows.
So from time immemorial twaddle has taken advantage of this to establish itself as the true Christian orthodoxy — hence these countless battalions of millions of Christians. This orthodoxy, so strong in numbers, so weak in mind, takes advantage of the fact that one cannot truthfully denounce it as heterodoxy, hypocrisy, etc. (as indeed one cannot) — ergo it is the true Christian orthodoxy.
And this can very well be argued. The fact is that in every situation the highest and the lowest have a certain superficial resemblance to one another, neither of them being a little lower than the high, nor having the intermediate qualification between high and low. Thus these two qualifications, that of being above all criticism, and that of being beneath all criticism, have a certain resemblance to one another. And so it is also with the orthodoxy of these masses and of the priests who live off of them en masse: it resembles true Christianity in so far as it is not heterodoxy or heresy.
In other respects it resembles true Christianity even less than does any heresy or heterodoxy whatsoever. The situation is this: as high as true Christianity stands above all heresy and error and aberration, just so deep below all heresy and error and aberration lies twaddle. But, as has been said, the difficulty about the New Testament is that, requiring as it does ideality and fighting against spirits, it does not once take aim at this immense corpus which in "Christendom" is constantly producing the Christian orthodoxy and the Christian seriousness which expresses itself in the fact that "witnesses to the truth" (what a satirical self-contradiction!) make a career and a success in this world by depicting on Sundays how truth must suffer in this world.
Of this fact one must take due notice. And when one has duly noticed it, one will see that after all the New Testament is in the right, that things do go as the New Testament has foretold. In the midst of this immense population of "Christians," this shoal of Christians, there live here and there some individuals, a single individual. For him the way is narrow (cf. the New Testament), he is hated by all (cf. the New Testament), to put him to death is regarded as a divine service (cf. the New Testament). This after all is a curious book, the New Testament; it really is in the right; for these individuals, this single individual — why, yer, they would be the Christians.