“Therefore you will be the best philosophers and the best explorers of the nature of things if you will learn from the apostle to consider creation as it waits, groans, and travails, that is, as it turns aways in disgust from what now is and desires that which is still in the future. For then the study of the nature of things, their accidents and their differences, will quickly grow worthless. As a result the foolishness of the philosophers is like a man who, joining himself to a builder and marveling at the cutting and hewing and measuring of the wood and beans, is foolishly content and quiet among these things, without concern as to what the builder finally intends to make by all these exertions. This man is empty-headed, and the work of such an assistant is meaningless. So all the creation of God, which is skillfully prepared for the future glory, is gazed upon by stupid people who look only at the mechanics but never see its final goals…Look how we esteem the study of the essences and actions and inactions of things, and the things themselves reject and groan over their own essences and actions and inactions! We praise and glorify the knowledge of that very thing which is sad about itself and is displeased with itself!…But now it is wise men and theologians, infected by the same ‘prudence of the flesh’ who derive a happy science out of a sad creation….” Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans