One more reason Oecolampadius offers the needed refresher course in Christianity: "New life brings repentance."

Here are two sentences that occur near the end of Oecolampadius' "Sermon on the Healing of the Blind Man at Jericho," which — after a very long interruption — I only just finished translating yesterday: "Neither ashes, nor fasting, nor external work grant any justice that is valid before God. New life produces repentance, so that we would no longer sin." The latter sentence is hugely important and merits the following footnote (which will appear, Lord willing, in a forthcoming publication of the whole translation):

Poenitentiam facit nova vita, ita ut non amplius peccemus. The nominative here is clearly nova vita. Poenitentiam, in the accusative case, is the direct object, while the verb peccemus is subjunctive. The cause-and-effect sequence here is striking: it is not that repentance has cajoled new life from God. Rather, we no longer wish to sin because the gift of new life has brought about repentance. This reordering—grace before repentance—would become Karl Barth’s great discovery 400 years later, before he himself would make his way to Basel.

The pedantic footnote is warranted because, when I ran the sentence through every online translator I could find, every one of them reordered the sentence completely incorrectly: "Repentance brings new life," they said. Wrong. Meanwhile, I have had in my files for some time the unpublished translation of a friendly Latin teacher which, when I consulted it, confirmed that, yes, indeed (according to his rendering): "It is the new life that brings about penitence."

So what accounts for this persistently ass-backwards way of translating a text that clearly and unambiguously articulates the proper ordo salutis? Is it a malevolent ghost in the translation machine? I would not necessarily rule it out. Or, more likely, is it that the crowd-sourced theology of Christians the world over, the popular theology that feeds AI algorithms and in effect teaches the machine, is so bad that the machine assumes it must overrule plain, clear, straightforward grammar with eisegesis and crank out bad translations to support bad theology?

Either way, once again, we see how Oecolampadius warrants careful study and fresh translation (without over-reliance on machine translation), for he was not only every bit as important and ground-breaking as Luther was in his day, he was not only way ahead of his time (vis-a-vis Barth), he also offers a much needed refresher in Christianity to a church that so often misunderstands and misrepresents its own theology that the emerging class of robot teachers are likewise learning it and teaching it wrongly.

P.S.: Where this post impinges on preaching Year D, the primary text that should come to mind is Romans 2:4.