Sovereign is whoever gets along without justifications.

But hasn't everything and everything become subject to justification in the meantime, in front of ourselves and in front of others?

Alas, there are no good reasons to eat what you eat, to laze about how to laze!

Just like that - that was yesterday.

Cultural encounter means: I give you my reasons as you give me yours.

Intuitions raise the question of rule-based "evidence";

felt soul mates should be able to discursively identify themselves.

Any inner-directed way of life that shows itself to be independent of external systems of counting makes itself suspect of irrationality.

We are simply not prepared to let something have an effect on us for no reason, not even religion on its holidays, when it demands a thorough sermon.

For Willy Praml it is a test of the possibilities of art to make the gospel understandable at Christmas without the apparatus of religious psychology, to let it speak for itself, untouched by every pastoral with its moral patterns of justification.

Big sell-out success

The director of the "Frankfurter Theater Willy Praml" succeeds in performing the gospel as a reading, as it were positivistically, without further theological breaks, without smoothing out the radical letters with the appeals for peace and solidarity.

Also this year the play "Jesus d´amour, geb. 0" was a sold-out huge success at Christmas.

Do a lot of people go here who want to avoid going to church because they think they can feel the roughness of religion better in the industrial cathedral atmosphere of the venue?

Praml has compiled the stories according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John into a body of text and distributed them among twelve actors -- enormous volumes of speech, recited in dialogue.

Expressive and strong in memory, Anna Staab as Maria and Michael Weber as Archangel Gabriel lead through the biblical storytelling.

Praml's trick is to have the performers step out of their roles again and again and, as private individuals, to make the monstrosities of the biblical demands, as they appear in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, commonplace: "If you only love those who love you, what reward can you have you expect in return?” (Mt 5:46).

This is said at the snack bar by the actors in a whimsical gesture that has, as a matter of course, accepted the metaphysical plausibility: Yes, of course, what reward could we expect?

And, someone else asks, there is no need to learn “from the lilies that grow in the field: they neither work nor spin.

But even Solomon in all his splendor was not dressed like one of them” (Mt. 6, 28f)?

You slap your hand on the forehead on stage: Yes, of course, not even Solomon!

In this way, the foreign remains without appearing strange.

Behind Praml's positivism is a magnificent hermeneutic of faith for which (religiously speaking: thank God!) good reasons always come too late.