the mystical theology of valentin weigel - DataSpace at Princeton ...

parcels God, who by rights is supremely One, into a series of articles and propositions
that can be analyzed and catechized. Moreover, Lutheran theology functioned on the
fundamental division of God’s Law from Gospel, what was referred to as orthotomia. In
Weigel’s view, God’s unity is further fractured when assent to these propositions is made
the condition of salvation—how could God ever be irrevocably lost to man if man relates
to God simply by virtue of existing? By using indifferent signification, Weigel thus
declines to consider doctrine as either an important activity for the church or indeed a
condition of salvation, and his writing thus becomes an irenic—a way of using language
that brings about peace.
Because Weigel considered God to be radically unknowable and unnameable,
truth about God always slips away in the process of articulating it, and as a result, neither
doctrine nor Scripture can function as the basis of a truly Christian church: no institution
can say what is true and what is not. Salvation cannot be allocated on the basis of spoken
or written words because it must be universally and naturally available, otherwise God
must be cruel for denying it to some by not letting them hear his saving words, and thus
his saving Word. The church cannot be only in Rome or in Wittenberg, and so it must be
both nowhere and everywhere—which is another way of saying that people are not in fact
sinners (not really, even though they do indeed do evil), and that they have no need of
religion because they always have God.
In discussing Weigel’s writings, I have shown that the idea of indifference,
though it is a term has negative connotations for many modern readers, is in fact key to
understanding his oeuvre as a whole. Rather than simply dismissing Weigel’s failure to
speak out about his divergent religious beliefs as cowardice, unravelling the complex
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