If we really are Christians — what then is God?
If it isn't so — that what we understand by being a Christian is a vain conceit, that all this machinery
with a State Church and 1000 spiritual-worldly counselors of chancery, etc., is a prodigious optical
illusion which in eternity will not help us in the least, on the contrary will be used as an accusation
against us — if it isn't so; for in that case, let us (for eternity's sake!) get rid of it the sooner the
better.
if it isn't so, if what we mean by being a Christian really is being a Christian — what then is God?
He is the most comical being that ever lived, His Word the most comical book that ever has come to light: to set heaven and earth in motion (as He does in His Word), so threaten with hell, with eternal punishment...in order to attain what we understand by being Christians (and we indeed are true Christians) — no, nothing so comical ever occurred! Imagine that a man with a loaded pistol stepped up to a person and said to him, "I'll shoot you dead," or imagine something still more terrible, that he were to say, "I'll seize upon your person and torture you to death in the most dreadful manner, if you do not (now be on the watch, for here it comes) ...make your own life here on earth as profitable and enjoyable as you possibly can." This surely is the most comical speech; for to bring that about one really does not need to threaten with a loaded pistol and the most agonizing kind of death; perhaps neither the loaded pistol nor the most agonizing kind of death would avail to prevent it. And so it is here: by the dread of eternal punishment (frightful menace!), by the hope of an eternal blessedness, to want to bring about...yes, to bring about what we are (for what we call a Christian is indeed to be a Christian), so then to want to bring about what we are: that we may live as we most like to live — for to refrain from civil crimes is nothing but plain shrewdness.
The most dreadful sort of blasphemy is that of which "Christendom" is guilty: transforming the God of Spirit into...ludicrous twaddle. And the stupidest [literally, most spirit-less] divine worship, more stupid than anything that is or was to be found in paganism, more stupid than worshiping a stone, an ox, an insect, more stupid than all that is — to worship under the name of God...a twaddler.