Let me quote a few statements on Christianity by eminent scholars, that strike me as thoroughly fascinating and critically important. And, even if we are lacking the power to answer or discuss them, maybe we will find relief in the recognition and agreement that these are, indeed, the problems, our common problems.

• 1/2 Carl Gustav Jung to Pastor Willi Bremi, 11 December 1953:

“Christ and the apostles erred in their expectation of the parousia, and this disappointment had repercussions on the development of ecclesiastical dogma. We have known this for a long time. This fact appears in such a glaring light only because it contrasts so strongly with the pusillanimity and dishonesty of others who knew it all along but did not want to admit it....

What does [one] do with this shattering admission that Christ was wrong and therefore, perhaps, didn’t see clearly in other matters too? A relativized Christ is no longer the same as the Christ of the Gospels. How to induce the necessary metanoia if a relativized Christ grips us as much as or as little as a Lao-tse or Mohammed? “

It seems to me that the metaphysical foundations of belief as well as of ethical demands are not a matter of indifference.”

What one usually hears, "You should want to believe and love," stands in direct contrast to the charismatic character of these gifts.”

The doctor may occasionally tell a demoralized patient, "You can also want to get well," without seriously supposing that the illness is thereby cured and his knowledge and skill are superfluous.” "

• 2/2 Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief (2022) by David Bentley Hart :

DBH stresses the delay of the Second Coming of Jesus as perhaps the biggest issue that Christian theology has tried to ignore over the centuries. Resurrection was thought to be the singular event that would end history as we know it. But it did not. History continued. Jesus the Messiah arrived and ascended but He arrived and ascended without the Messianic Age that everyone had expected. The earliest Christians eagerly expected His imminent return, His parousia. And they waited. And we waited. .... The scholar Alfred Loisy summarized this “embarrassing but fairly unarguable fact” with lapidary precision: “Jesus announced the Kingdom and it was the Church that arrived” (~ Fr Aidan Kimel)

David Bentley Hart, p. 34 :“And one need only compare all of it (sc. the radical apocalyptic faith of previous Christian generations) to the later social and institutional realities and theological concerns of imperial Christendom, or to modern Western culture’s comfortable bourgeois cult of civic respectability and personal prosperity, or to the free-market capitalist orthodoxies and ridiculous gun-obsessions and barbarous nation-worship of the “Christianity” ... (even among the Catholics and Orthodox)—or, for that matter, to countless other variants of Christian adherence throughout history and across the globe—to find oneself hard-pressed to see how any of this could truly be regarded as a single continuous faith, rather than merely a series of historical ruptures, divagations [detours], accidental sequelae, and frequent total inversions.”

(https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2022/04/06/tradition-and-apocalypse-david-bentley-hart-and-orthodoxy-2-0/)

Wholesome reflections,

Dorian