Saul Bellow’s attitude towards Judaism was changed completely by the Six Day War in June 1967. It transformed him from a socialist to a conservative. He had a need to get involved and, much to the surprise of his family, he left for Israel to cover the war as a correspondent for Newsday. “I had to go,” Saul explained at the time.
ellauri222.html on line 131: “In college I behaved as though my career was to be a writer, and that guided me,” Bellow later said. There was also the fact that his principal interest was literature, and, until after the war, Jews were rarely hired by English departments. “You weren’t born to it” is the way the chairman of the department at Northwestern clarified the matter when Bellow inquired about graduate school. Leader thinks that this encounter “produced a lifelong antipathy, mild but real, to English departments.” It’s true that there was antipathy. But Bellow would have been interested in a university career only as a means to support his writing. Fiction was his calling. “He was focused, he was dedicated to becoming what he was, from the beginning,” David Peltz, Bellow’s oldest friend, told Leader. “I mean, he never veered.”
ellauri222.html on line 139: So even “Dangling Man,” an awkwardly written book about which Bellow later said, “I can’t read a page of it without feeling embarrassed,” was received as a sign that the novel might after all be up to its historic task. “Here, for the first time I think, the experience of a new generation has been seized,” Delmore Schwartz wrote, in Partisan Review. In The New Yorker, Edmund Wilson called “Dangling Man” a “testimony on the psychology of a whole generation.” When Bellow’s second novel, “The Victim,” came out, in 1947, Martin Greenberg, in Commentary, explained that Bellow had succeeded in making Jewishness “a quality that informs all of modern life . . . the quality of modernity itself.” In Partisan Review, Elizabeth Hardwick suggested that Bellow might become “the redeeming novelist of the period.”
ellauri222.html on line 141: This notion that Bellow’s achievement as a novelist was redemptive of the form was a consistent theme in the reviews up through “Herzog.” So was the notion that his protagonists were representatives of the modern condition. After “Herzog,” those reactions largely disappeared. People stopped fretting about the death of the novel, and Bellow’s protagonists started being treated as what they always were, oddballs and cranks. But the critical reception of Bellow’s books in the first half of his career funded his reputation. It cashed out, ultimately, in the Nobel Prize. Nobels are awarded to writers who are judged to have universalized the marginal.
ellauri222.html on line 169: At Bard, Bellow became close friends with a literature professor named Jack Ludwig. As Leader describes him, Ludwig was an oversized personality, a big man, extravagant, a shameless purveyor of bad Yiddish, and an operator. Ludwig idolized Bellow; people who knew them said that Ludwig wanted to be Bellow. He flattered Bellow, went for long walks with him, started up a literary journal with him, and generally insinuated himself into Bellow’s life. Bellow accepted the proffer of adulatory attentiveness. The couples (Ludwig was married) socialized together. This was the period when Bellow wrote “Seize the Day,” which Partisan Review published in a single issue, in 1956, after The New Yorker turned it down, and “Henderson the Rain King,” published in 1959, a novel whose hero was based on a neighbor of the Bellows in upstate New York.
ellauri222.html on line 179: I have just given you the back story and the dramatis personae of “Herzog.” “Herzog” is a novel about a forty-seven-year-old man having a nervous breakdown after learning that his much younger wife, who has left him abruptly, had been cheating on him with his closest friend. The man seeks succor in the arms of a loving, patient, and understanding woman. There is at least one respect in which the novel is not based on real life: Bellow didn’t have a nervous breakdown. He wrote “Herzog” instead.
ellauri222.html on line 183: “Herzog” is a revenge novel. The ex-wife, Madeleine, is a stone-cold man-killer. Her lover, Valentine Gersbach, is described as a “loud, flamboyant, ass-clutching brute.” Ludwig had a Ph.D. and a damaged foot; Bellow makes Gersbach a radio announcer with a wooden leg. The Herzog character is passive, loving, an innocent soul who cannot make sense of a world in which people like his estranged wife and her lover can exist. He is an ex-university professor, the author of a distinguished tome called “Romanticism and Christianity.” The Rosette Lamont character, called Ramona, is a sexpot with a heart of gold; she specializes in intimate candlelight dinners and lacy lingerie. She is a professor of love, not French.
ellauri222.html on line 185: “Herzog” was nevertheless received the way all Bellow’s novels had been received: as a report on the modern condition. Many of the critics who reviewed it—Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Richard Ellmann, Richard Poirier—knew Bellow personally and knew all about the divorce. (Poirier was an old friend of Ludwig’s; the review he published, in Partisan Review, was a hatchet job.) None of these reviewers mentioned the autobiographical basis of the book, and several of them warned against reading it autobiographically, without ever explaining why anyone might want to. The world had no way of knowing that the story was not completely made up.
ellauri222.html on line 187: Howe wrote that “Herzog” was a novel “driven by an idea”—the idea that modern man can overcome alienation and despair. Howe could see the appeal of this idea, but he was worried that it might not have been “worked out with sufficient care.” The reviewer in the Times Book Review thought that the novel offered “a credo for the times.” “The age is full of fearful abysses,” the reviewer explained. “If people are to go ahead, they must move into and through these abysses,” and so on.
ellauri222.html on line 189: Bellow must have been tickled to death. The inventive feature of “Herzog” is a series of letters that the protagonist, in his misery, composes not only to Madeleine and Gersbach but to famous people (like President Eisenhower) and philosophers (like Heidegger and Nietzsche). These long letters, unfinished and unmailed, are sendups of an intellectual’s effort to understand human behavior by means of the conceptual apparatus of Mortimer Adler’s Great Books. Herzog is a comic figure, a holy fool, a schlimazel with a Ph.D. The whole point of his story is that when you are completely screwed the best you can hope for is a little sex and sympathy. The Western canon isn’t going to be much help.
ellauri222.html on line 191: The determination to consider the novel strictly as fiction extended even to its characters. Rosette Lamont reviewed the novel. She, too, treated the book as pure make-believe. She breezed right by the Ramona character (“Her religion is sex, a welcome relief from Madeleine’s phony conversion . . . but Herzog is too divided in his mind, too busy with resentment to free himself from a heavy conscience. Besides he is suspicious of pleasure, having learned Julien Sorel’s lesson,” and so on). She concluded with the thought that at the end of the novel Herzog enters into “a theandric relationship with the world around him.”
ellauri222.html on line 195: You can see the biographical problem. From the beginning, Bellow drew on people he knew, including his wives and girlfriends and the members of his own family, for his characters. In “Augie March,” almost every character—and there are dozens—was directly based on some real-life counterpart. Most of “Herzog” is a roman à clef. Leader therefore decided to treat the novels as authoritative sources of information about the people in Bellow’s life. When Leader tells us about Jack Ludwig and Sondra Tschacbasov, he quotes the descriptions of Gersbach and Madeleine in “Herzog.” In the case of the many relatives with counterparts in “Augie March,” this can get confusing. You’re not always sure whether you’re reading about a person or a fictional version of that person.
ellauri222.html on line 203: “Herzog,” too, sags in the middle, a long episode in which Herzog reconnects with Ramona. But Bellow came up with a brilliant solution for the second half. Waiting in a courthouse to see his lawyer, Herzog sits in on a trial. A woman and her boyfriend are being tried for murdering her small child, whom they have tortured and beaten to death. The woman is mentally unfit; Herzog hears evidence that she has been diagnosed with a lesion on her brain. (A diabolical touch: Sasha had been diagnosed with a brain lesion.)
ellauri222.html on line 207: Actually, these episodes were not entirely invented. Bellow lifted them straight out of “The Brothers Karamazov.” A child tortured by its parents is Ivan Karamazov’s illustration of the problem of evil: what kind of God would allow that to happen? And Herzog with his gun at the window is a reënactment of Dmitri Karamazov, the murder weapon in his hand, spying through the window on his father. Dmitri is caught and convicted of a murder he desired but did not commit. “Herzog,” though, is a comedy. The next day, Herzog gets in a minor traffic accident and the cops discover the loaded gun in his car. But, after some hairy moments in the police station, he is let go. Desperately searching the Great Books for wisdom, Herzog briefly finds himself living in one. He can’t wait to get out.
ellauri222.html on line 575: Mintouchian’s invalid wife, Mrs. Mintouchian is aware of her husband’s infidelity and tells Augie of her husband: “He is great, despite being all too human.”
ellauri236.html on line 417: “Hello, baby,” he said. “How am I getting on?”
ellauri236.html on line 425: Ma’s eyes suddenly snapped with rage. Her face turned purple. “Slim wants her,” she said, lowering her voice and glaring at Eddie. “He’s going to have her. You keep out of it! That goes for the rest of you too!” Eddie felt horny for the girl, but he wasn’t going to risk his life for her.
ellauri236.html on line 434: “Hello, baby,” Eddie said. “Come on in. No need to keep your pants on. This is a friendly meeting, I just wanna fondle your bag. Pass it over.” She crossed her legs, showing him what she had between her knees before adjusting her skirt.
ellauri297.html on line 44: Materialism is the butt of every Dad joke. A child comes to the father of their youth, and say, “Dad, I’m hungry,” to which the beloved father figure replies, “Hello Hungry, I’m Dad!” It pokes fun at the idea that our whole identity could be the sum total of our physical markers, desires and chemical reactions. This would be akin to someone ‘coming out,’ to us and us responding, “Hello Gay! I’m Cis!” It’s ludicrous! But, our culture still does it–quite a bit, actually. We define ourselves and others concretely based on what we own rather than on what we cannot see; our souls.
ellauri384.html on line 222: The concepts of “Heaven” and “Hell” are not only difficult for any rational person to believe, but they are not even well-defined. Even within the belief system of Christianity, there are multiple descriptions of Heaven and Hell. Some subsets of Christendom don’t believe in hell. Those who read the Bible closely insist that “Hell” is only for traitorous angels. Everybody has a different idea of who is “definitely” going to be sent to one place or another.
ellauri384.html on line 224: “Heaven” itself is a rather bizarre concept. Mark Twain underscored the lunacy of the idea in his short story “Captain Stormfield’s Visit To Heaven.” In that story and in “Letters From The Earth” he muses about how humans have invented a place which is full of things that they never engaged in or cared about while on earth, and yet imagine themselves enjoying for all eternity. How many harp enthusiasts do YOU know personally? How many millenia would you enjoy singing the same song of praise over and over? How long would you delight in praying to the glory of God 24 hours a day? If you don’t do that now, why do you think you’re going to enjoy it when you’re dead?
ellauri395.html on line 1127: Ylistä uskossa: “Herra antaa minulle voiman korkeudesta (Apt. 1:8) ja vahvistaa minua väkevyytensä voimassa (Ef. 6:10), Hän antaa väsyneelle voimaa yltäkyllin (Jes. 40:29), Hän on antanut minulle vallan tallata kaikkea vihollisen voimaa, eikä mikään ole minua vahingoittava (Luuk. 10:19). (Väärinkäsitysten välttämisexi: Hra ei tarjoa alamaisilleen mitään supervoimia. Kaikki voima on ja pysyy tuolla ylhäällä, puhelinmaston kaatanutta ukkosta lukuunottamatta.)
ellauri411.html on line 52: A virgin marriage, chaste, in the friend zone. And now, suddenly, an affidavit stating that they most certainly had sex, quite a lot of sex actually, in fact too much sex for poor, exhausted Bowden. Mick Jagger sang in “Some Girls”, when the Stones were at their sleaziest, “Black girls just want to get fucked all night but I don’t have that much jam”; this was Bowden, begging off his conjugal duties, spent, drained, a little man unable to satisfy his woman. (As a singing teacher in California he was described by a student: “He wore spats and carried a cane, had pink cheeks, and was rather short.”)
xxx/ellauri059.html on line 386: “He hath disgraced me, and
xxx/ellauri087.html on line 192: “Hellän dynamiikan idea on, että siitä syntyy vaikutusta. Se ohjaa, miten se, mikä muuttuu, muuttuu. Se kohteliaasti tuuppaa muutosta kohti”, Saarinen aloittaa. Senhän takia sirkustirehtöörilläkin on silinterihattu ja apinalla fezi.
xxx/ellauri103.html on line 272: But in my events to promote Big Brother, like trying to peddle it to my acquaintances, I started to notice a pattern. Most of the people buying the book in the signing queue were thin. Well the whole queue was pretty thin. Especially in the US, fat is now one of those issues where you either have to be one of us, or you’re the enemy. It's like Christianity: who is not for Jesus is against him. We don't know if he was fat, but most likely he was scrawny, he could not even carry his cross. I verified this when I had a long email correspondence with a “Healthy at Any Size” activist, who was incensed by the novel, which she hadn’t even read. Which she refused to read. No amount of explaining that the novel was on her side, that it was a book that was terribly pained by the way heavy people are treated and how unfairly they are judged, could overcome the scrawny author’s photo on the flap.
xxx/ellauri114.html on line 345: “He will also invade the Beautiful Land. Many countries will fall, but Edom, Moab and the leaders of Ammon will be delivered from his hand.”
xxx/ellauri124.html on line 368: with depression cope a lot easier than people who don’t receive those, “Hey,
xxx/ellauri124.html on line 377: “Here’s a photo of my penis." "Mun ei ole ihan pakko bylsii sua mut
xxx/ellauri124.html on line 395: “Hey, remember this? I love our friendship.”
xxx/ellauri125.html on line 428: From the start, critics complained about the ostensible sameness of Roth’s books, their narcissism and narrowness—or, as he himself put it, comparing his own work to his father’s conversation, “Family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew.” Over time, he took on vast themes—love, lust, loneliness, marriage, masculinity, ambition, community, solitude, loyalty, betrayal, patriotism, rebellion, piety, disgrace, the body, the imagination, American history, mortality, the relentless mistakes of life—and he did so in a variety of forms: comedy, parody, romance, conventional narrative, postmodernism, autofiction. In each performance of a self, Roth captured the same sound and consciousness. in nearly fifty years of reading him I’ve never been more bored. I got to know Roth in the nineteen-nineties, when I interviewed him for this magazine around the time he published “The Human Stain.” To be in his presence was an exhilarating, though hardly relaxing, experience. He was unnervingly present, a condor on a branch, unblinking, alive to everything: the best detail in your story, the slackest points in your argument. His intelligence was immense, his performances and imitations mildly funny. “He who is loved by his parents is a conquistador,” Roth used to say, and he was adored by his parents, though both could be daunting to the young Philip. Herman Roth sold insurance; Bess ruled the family’s modest house, on Summit Avenue, in a neighborhood of European Jewish immigrants, their children and grandchildren. There was little money, very few books. Roth was not an academic prodigy; his teachers sensed his street intelligence but they were not overawed by his classroom performance. Roth learned to write through imitation. His first published story, “The Day It Snowed,” was so thoroughly Truman Capote that, he later remarked, he made “Capote look like a longshoreman.”
xxx/ellauri130.html on line 583: “I don’t think there’s ever been a time when you could just say anything.” He recalls an early comedy show – this must have been in the late 80s – where the host apologised to the crowd after Skinner had performed some risque sexual material. “He said I’d never play at the venue again – and then he launched into a load of racist material and brought the house down. Everyone’s got their own standards and restraints. But I think it’s been good for me to keep questioning what I say. It’s made me think more positively about racist jokes and not so much about penises. My knob is not working anymore BTW, I'm 65. We’re both deeply ashamed. Can't lift our eye to the public.”
xxx/ellauri139.html on line 471: “He had a fever late, and in the fit Sillä on nyt korona, ja toristen kuumeisena
xxx/ellauri139.html on line 472: “He cursed thee and thine, both house and land: Se kiros sun koko suvun, talon, sutkin, rääppä!
xxx/ellauri139.html on line 561: “Her own lute thou wilt see: no time to spare, on tytön luuttu täys tämmingissä.
xxx/ellauri148.html on line 268: Our master said two things in the name of R. Helbo: Why did the Fathers love to be buried in the Land of Israel? Because the dead of the land of Israel will be the first to come to life in the days of the Messiah, and they will eat [enjoy] the years of the Messiah. And R. Hama bar R. Hanina said: “He who dies abroad and is buried there, two deaths are in his hand….” R. Simon said: “If so, the righteous who are buried abroad will be the losers? [Not so,] for what does the Holy One, blessed be He, do? He hollows out the earth before them, and makes them into something like a skin bottle, ant they will roll and come until they reach the Land of Israel. And when they reach the Land of Israel He put the spirit of life into them they stand up.” (Midrash Tan. Buber, 1:214)[23]
xxx/ellauri154.html on line 129: Seuraavana vuonna myöhään suuren torstain iltana isä Zosima tuli sovitulle paikalle ja näki kuun valossa Marian Jordanin toisella rannalla. Huomattuaan Zosiman Maria teki ristinmerkin ja ylitti joen kulkien veden päällä. Isä Zosima hämmästyi niin, että valmistautui kumartumaan hänen eteensä. Maria sanoi moittivasti: “Mitä aiot tehdä, abba Zosima? Sinä pidät käsissäsi pyhää ehtoollista ja tahdot kumartua maahan! Kuppi kaatuu ja näkyleivät tippuvat!” Nautittuaan kyynelsilmin pyhän ehtoollisen Maria sanoi: “Herra, nyt Sinä annat palvelijasi rauhassa lähteä, niin kuin olet luvannut. Minun silmäni ovat nähneet Sinun pelastuksesi.” (Luuk. 2:29) Sitten hän hyvästeli Zosiman ja esitti tälle pyynnön, että tämä tulisi myös seuraavana vuonna suuren paaston aikana sille paikalle, missä he olivat ensimmäisen kerran tavanneet. Isä Zosima oli tuonut mukanaan vähän viikunoita, taateleita ja vedessä kostutettuja linssejä ja tarjosi niitä Marialle. Tämä otti sormenpäillään vain kolme linssiä, teki ristinmerkin ja käveli niiden avulla Jordanin yli. Isä Zosimaa jäi harmittamaan kovasti se, että hän ei ollut muistanut kysyä Marian nimeä, mutta hän päätti ottaa siitä selvän, kun he seuraavana vuonna kohtaisivat uudestaan.
xxx/ellauri166.html on line 247: Kun viholliset ryhtyvät vastauskonpuhdistuxeen, eivät ne saa mitään muuta aikaan kuin, että saavat Jumalan nauramaan. Lapset esittävät meille huvittavan näytelmän, kun he tarttuvat oljenkorteen ja, ikään kuin se olisi veitsi, koettavat sillä tappaa koiran tai sian. Kukaan meistä ei voisi myöskään olla nauramatta, jos hän näkisi narrin ottavan kepakon käteensä ja juoksevan suurella voimalla päin tornia yrittäen näin kaataa sen kumoon. Olisihan moinen hanke typerä ja turha. Sillä kun vertaat turkkilaista, paavia, piispoja, kuninkaita ja herroja ja koko saatanan valtakuntaa tähän, niin eivätkö he ole samanlaisia kuin tuo narri, joka ponnistelee kaataakseen valtavan tornin kepillä? Niinpä he esittävät Jumalalle näytelmän ja pilan. “He esittävät hänelle hupinäytelmän, kun he ovat eniten vihoissaan.” Todellisuudessa he sellaisten ajatusten ja ponnistelujen kanssa askaroidessaan eivät ole mitään muuta kuin ilveily ja, kuten me saksaksi sanomme, he ovat “Herran Jumalamme narreja”.
xxx/ellauri166.html on line 299: Shechinah שכינה (also spelled Shekhinah) is derived from the word shochen שכן, “to dwell within.” The Shechinah is Cod or that which Cod is dwelling within. Sometimes we translate Shechinah as “The Divine Presence.” The word Shechinah is feminine, and so when we refer to Cod as the Shechinah, we say “She.” Of course, we’re still referring to the same One Cod, just in a different modality. After all, you were probably wondering why we insist on calling Cod “He.” We’re not talking about a being limited by any form—certainly not a body that could be identified as male or female. "It" would be better, only it reminds one too much of Freud's id. "They" would sound dangerously polytheistic.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 339: “He got out his pencils and a new cahier, sharpened five pencils and began to write the story of his father."
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 410: “He crossed the street,” Nick Adams said. “He was dead and that was all.” Papa looked at him and he looked at his drink. “I killed the wrong man.”
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 444: “Hey, I ain't got no problem,” the man said.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 488: “I've come to appreciate this. The harsh details in the background with the stillness in the foreground here—” It was Swans Reflecting Elephants by Dalí. “See this arrogant son of a bitch, Juice, missing the scene. The elephants standing on the shore and the swans floating over them.” Behind the swans grew trees, twisting to the sky. “He's so arrogant. And ignorant. He walked all the way from the town up the hill in the distance and here he's facing away with his hand on his hip. He can't see the color of the sky different from the reflection in the pond.”
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 494: Juice pointed across the room and said, “Here is something you will love, Papa.”
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 504: When they came, Papa stood up and approached one of the officers. He frowned and Papa punched him in the stomach and said, “Hey, boy-o, there it is!” The younger officer looked alarmed but the first one assured him.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 514: “He will not be back,” Juice said with authority.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 534: “He said he killed the wrong man and nothing else.”
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 548: “You wouldn't want to know him,” Nick said. “He's a real bright boy.”
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 621: Another bit of imaginative projection upon James’ life can be found in Ernest Hemingway’s letters. This novelist, on learning that Brooks had written that James was “prevented by an accident from taking part in the Civil War,” immediately incorporated this into his nearly finished novel, The Sun Also Rises. In Chapter 12, Jake Barnes refers to his World War I accident, and Gorton says, “That’s the sort of thing that can’t be spoken of. That’s what you ought to work up into a mystery. Like Henry’s bicycle.” Barnes replies it wasn’t a bicycle; “he was riding horseback.” (In his memoirs, James spoke of having had a “horrid” but “obscure hurt.” He had strained his back during a stable fire while serving as a volunteer fireman.) Hemingway had originally inserted James’ name in the novel, but Scribner’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, vetoed this. Hemingway insisted. They finally compromised on the “Henry” alone. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Brooks, “Why didn’t you touch more on James’ impotence (physical) and its influence?” The castration theme was picked up by R.P. Blackmur, Glenway Wescott, Lionel Trilling, and F.O. Matthiessen in their critical writings.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 625: These larger emotions apparently do not touch the single-minded Novick. He is caught by l’initiation première. “The passage seems impossible to misunderstand,” he says. (For the full quote, which Novick does not provide,.) In a footnote, he asserts, “James had his sexual initiation in Cambridge and Ashburton Place.” A bit enigmatically, he also says, “[I]t would be fatal to expand on that in the book for which these are the [foot]notes.” We are left wondering why Novick thinks it would be “fatal” to have what would be a bit more evidence. And he still hasn’t named James’ partner. A sentence in which he appears to be rummaging around for explanations says that the companion “seems to be a veteran, an officer.” He adds, “Henry hinted he was Wendell Holmes.” But it is Novick who is doing the hinting. Holmes was a close friend of Henry’s brother, William. Henry looked at Holmes with a certain aloofness.
xxx/ellauri281.html on line 521: Monroe was rebounding from her unhappy nine-month marriage to DiMaggio. Miller was preparing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his own marriage had long been troubled. As the demonically quotable Kazan had earlier put it: “He was starved for sexual relief.”
xxx/ellauri410.html on line 184: According to the real Colombo, the West Indies natives were not black. Eliot’s Bolovians, on the contrary, are fat, black, and promiscuous. Bolovians are black because they are natives and primitive, and described with such essentialist terms as are associated with Africans. It is difficult to accept such statements as “Eliot’s verse expresses revulsion of the carnal world” (Douglass 150) when one reads the Bolovian Epic. Sex is clearly part of the fun and there is no revulsion in these verses, except perhaps in the reader’s response to them. Back in Spain Columbo quarrels with the Queen. “They terminated the affair/ By fucking on the sofa.” Although his syphilis acts up again, Columbo is undaunted. “He spun his balls around his head / And cried ‘Hooray for whores!’ . . . Exeunt the king and queen severally” (IMH 319).
xxx/ellauri410.html on line 210: Manila Harbor in 1909. “He was forced to resign . . . following an alleged liaison with a cabin boy” (Letters II 768n). But the cabin boy was savʼd alive/ And buggerʼd, in the sphincter. Eliot was convinced that his father thought him a failure. Publication of these verses might reverse that problem.
xxx/ellauri410.html on line 1022: “He upholds the universe by the word of his power.” (Hebrews 1:3O)
xxx/ellauri420.html on line 323: In every offensive and by any means possible his sworn, relentless goal is to uproot and utterly destroy God’s good and gracious work in Christ. But he’s already judged, found underweight, and the verdict is in. “He is stuffed,” Jesus cried in his dying breath. All the work of Satan to destroy, all his lies and accusations, all the sin and mayhem he has imposed on God’s good creation—all of this has been obliterated and eradicated in the death of our enfleshed God, le baton rose, for the sins of the world.
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