After God. Peter Sloterdijk

p. 718.25 With this et cetera Luther brings to light a scholarly brutality that illuminates his later demeanor. The young scholar treats the first word of Christ testified to in the New Testament – which is a quotation from John the Baptist – as a truism that one can cite in an argument just for the purpose of being right. The “etc.” of the first thesis exposes the Reformation as a giant staging of “eccentric positionality” in the theological mode: penance as an attitude of being right.26 [TN: Translation from Martin Luther, 1483–1546, edited by Kurt Aland (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1967).]27 [TN: Ibid., translation modified.]28 Albert Schweitzer, Indian Thought and Its Development, translated by Lilian M. Rigby Russell (New York: Holt, 1936 [1935]).