United States or United Kingdom ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And, on the other hand, Protestantism, absorbed in this preoccupation with justification, which in spite of its religious guise was taken more in an ethical sense than anything else, ends by neutralizing and almost obliterating eschatology; it abandons the Nicene symbol, falls into an anarchy of creeds, into pure religious individualism and a vague esthetic, ethical, or cultured religiosity.
I do not for a moment suggest that this happy-go-lucky eschatology is formally countenanced by the Churches and Sects. They would doubtless repudiate it with indignation; but the fact remains that their own teaching is largely responsible for it.
Simply because for the very life of them they cannot believe in their own inspired eschatology. Verbally, of course, they assent to the whole code of immoralities connected with future retribution, but "a certain obstinate rationality" in them prevents their translating their faith into practice. Hence, the Catholics we meet are no more Helbecks than ourselves.
The general result of reading the literature belonging to this period is to create the impression that recent scholarship has gone much further than is justifiable in the attempt to systematise Jewish thought on eschatology.
In theology we have many curious subdivisions; among the rest eschatology, that is to say, the geography, geology, etc., of the "undiscovered country;" in medicine, if the surgeon who deals with dislocations of the right shoulder declines to meddle with a displacement on the other side, we are not surprised, but ring the bell of the practitioner who devotes himself to injuries of the left shoulder.
Take any of the dogmatic systems that have resulted from the latest Protestant dissolvent analysis that of Kaftan, the follower of Ritschl, for example and note the extent to which eschatology is reduced.
We can only say that secularism, like other religions, needs an eschatology, and has produced one. But the superstition cannot flourish much longer. The period of expansion is over, and we must adjust our view of earthly providence to a state of decline. For no nation can flourish when it is the ambition of the large majority to put in fourpence and take out ninepence.
For the phrase inevitably has its point in the word "Hell"; Homer, we may suppose, would have preferred the point to come in the word "enact." In any case, the details of Christian eschatology must not engage us much in interpreting Goethe's epigram.
It was the Apostle Paul himself who said that "if Jesus has not risen from the dead, then is our faith in vain, and we are, of all men, most miserable." So, you see, friend Adler, it is not "sometimes insinuated," as you say, but it is openly, and to our thinking, logically asserted, that if Jesus did not rise from the dead, the whole fabric of Christian eschatology falls to the ground.
The student of comparative religions is interested in noticing how a code of morals founded upon atheistic humanitarianism, in its origin utterly destitute of theology, has developed into a colossal system of demonology, dogmatics, eschatology, myths and legends, with a pantheon more populous than that of old Rome.
Word Of The Day